YouTube is putting AI labels where you’ll actually see them

In the wake of Google expanding its AI verification efforts at I/O, YouTube is now finally going to start taking AI labeling seriously. YouTube has announced that it’s relocating AI disclosures on Shorts and long-form videos to make them easier to spot and will start automatically identifying and labeling AI-generated content on the platform.

For regular YouTube videos, the label — which says “AI” next to a recognizable information symbol — will now appear directly below the video player, above the description. Currently, this information is hidden on the videos themselves and can only be viewed by expanding the video description and checking under the “How this content was made” section, which requires people to proactively inspect every video description.

For YouTube Shorts, that same AI label will also appear as an overlay on the video — YouTube has apparently been testing a variation of this label for some time. It also previously used an overlay on Shorts that flags if a video contains “altered or synthetic content.”

I’ve pointed out that YouTube’s AI labeling practices have been inconsistent until now, so hopefully these updates will establish a system that the platform actually sticks with.

“By moving these labels on to the main stage, viewers get the context they need at a glance,” YouTube said in its announcement. “This is now the single label format for all photorealistic and meaningfully AI altered or generated content on YouTube. For content that is unrealistic, animated, or slightly altered, viewers can find this disclosure in the expanded description.”

YouTube is also further expanding its AI labeling efforts by… actually looking for more AI content. The video streaming platform says it’s rolling out “new internal signals” sometime this month that will help it to automatically identify and label AI-generated videos. YouTube says it still requires creators to manually disclose when they use photorealistic AI, but now if a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, an AI label will be applied automatically if YouTube’s systems “detect significant photorealistic AI use.”

If video content is incorrectly flagged and labeled by YouTube, creators can update the disclosure status in YouTube Studio. That said, if the creator used YouTube’s AI tools like Veo or Dream Screen, or if the content contains C2PA metadata that indicates it was fully AI-generated, those AI disclosures will be permanent.

YouTube already has automated systems in place to detect AI-generated and synthetically altered content using markers like C2PA and Google’s SynthID. So I guess now it’s committing to do a better job, at least for AI videos that are trying to mimic realistic humans and photorealistic environments. YouTube also says these changes aim to “make it as easy as possible for creators and viewers to have the right information” and that disclosure labels alone won’t impact monetization or recommendation algorithms.