YouTube Shares Insights Into the Potential of Gen AI for Creators

Like most social platforms, YouTube is going hard on AI, and looking to integrate more generative AI features to ensure that its creators can use them to best advantage.

But as yet, I’m not sure that any social platform has come up with a killer use case for AI.

I mean, sure, the current image creation and chatbot tools are interesting, though mostly as a novelty, while more extreme uses of AI (like a social platform populated entirely by AI bots) seem to step away from the “social” element of the medium.

And outside of these uses, I’m not sure that there is a great AI use case, at least at the consumer end of social apps.

But that may be changing.

According to a new report from YouTube, more and more creators are now incorporating AI into their process, with 92% of creators are already using Gen AI tools.

And yet:

“Despite this, 90% of creators do not feel like they’re using Gen AI to the fullest extent possible. This implies that while creators are adopting Gen AI tools, many may not fully understand the capabilities, or lack the resources to maximize their effectiveness.”

This is the gap that YouTube’s now trying to bridge, by providing more insight into how generative AI tools will be able to empower creators to maximize their output, and explore all-new opportunities through systematic improvement.

Though thankfully, YouTube hasn’t gone too hard on the “game changing” angle with this overview.

YouTube’s 17-page “The Future of Tech and Creativity” report looks at the various ways in which Gen AI tools can practically assist creators right now, including:

• Streamlining labor-intensive tasks, like editing text, images, audio, or video.
• Developing new ideas and concepts, by using AI as a sounding board
• Improving content quality, by refining visuals, optimizing audio, suggesting enhancements, etc.

This is a logical, and realistic overview of the benefits of gen AI, because again, while there has been a lot of hype and focus on AI tools, most of them don’t offer significant utility.

At least not yet.

In future, the simplification of various tasks through AI will streamline many more processes. In particular, I imagine that generative AI is going to empower more creators to build for AR and VR environments, because you’ll no longer need in-depth coding knowledge to do so, and as these technologies become more commonplace, that could be extremely valuable.

YouTube has also provided a more logical, grounded overview of the future potential of the tech.

As you can see in this overview, most creators believe that AI tools will become valuable assistance devices, while they’ll also help with audio translations to reach a broader audience, and developing more professional looking visuals and effects.

It’s a good, grounded overview from YouTube, which doesn’t oversell the “magic” of generative AI, and points to actual, real-world use cases, available right now, that are being facilitated by AI tools.

And while for some these will be underwhelming, as we’re being sold on the transformative nature of these tools, this is an actual, logical explanation of how AI tools can maximize your efforts, which is important to note.

You can download YouTube’s “The Future of Tech and Creativity” report here.