YouTube content creators will soon have a slew of new AI-empowered tools at their disposal, the company announced Wednesday at its Made on YouTube event in New York City, including the ability to generate a complete six-second YouTube Shorts video clip with a text prompt.
The new capability arrives thanks to the integration of Google Deep Mind’s Veo video generation model into YouTube Shorts. Built to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s Sora, Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha, Adobe’s Firefly or Kuaishou Technology’s Kling, Veo can generate six-second clips at 1080p resolution across a wide range of cinematic themes and styles.
Veo’s integration will augment YouTube’s AI-powered “Dream Screen,” which debuted in 2023 and enabled content creators to generate backgrounds for their videos. Users will now be able to enter a text prompt into Dream Screen, have it generate four image outputs, and then animate one of them with Veo. Any content created with this workflow will be watermarked with Google’s SynthID system, though repeated studies have shown how easily such visual identifiers can be circumvented.
Veo wasn’t the only new feature announced at the event. Google is also working on digital “jewels” that viewers can send to live-streamers, similar to the “gifts” on TikTok. Vertical Livestreams in the U.S. will be the first to try the “jewels.” What’s more, the company expanded its automatic dubbing service to include French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as made its Community hubs available to more channels.
Google also announced that creators can use AI to help them “brainstorm” video ideas in YouTube Studio. The Inspiration tab, which has been in beta testing, will not only suggest the concept for what you should make but it will also generate a title, thumbnail, and even the first few lines of dialog, all automatically. These new tools should help further lower YouTube’s barriers to entry for content creators and help the video platform better compete with the likes of TikTok.
