Clone yourself: YouTube plans to let creators make Shorts using their own AI digital twin

AI swill is almost to overrun your feeds even out thomas more as YouTube announced its plan to allow creators to post Shorts using their own likeness. The plan was revealed during YouTube CEO Neal Mohan's annual letter on Wednesday where he also noted that ‘AI will remain a tool for expression, not a replacement.’

The company hasn't given any details on when the feature would launch or how it would work. Presumably, it should work similar to how OpenAI's Sora app allows users to create photorealistic versions of themselves. The app asks users to record a short selfie clip and audio recording to create a 3D avatar of their likeness that can be used to feature in AI-generated videos.

Mohan says that the company clearly labels content that is generated using its AI products and creators will have to disclose they have created ‘realistic altered or synthetic content’.

He also announced that the company will ‘equip creators with new tools to manage the use of their likeness in AI-generated content’.

Will AI Slop invade YouTube?

Mohan also talked about the rise of AI slop while noting that ‘Over the past 20 years, we’ve learned not to impose any preconceived notions on the creator ecosystem.’ He, however, stressed that the platform also has a responsibility to ‘maintain the high-quality viewing experience that people want’.

“To reduce the spread of low-quality AI content, we’re actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combatting spam and clickbait, and reducing the spread of low-quality, repetitive content,” he added.

The YouTube CEO says that Shorts are now averaging 200 billion views per day. Meanwhile, Mohan also announced other new features coming to Shorts, including the ability to add image posts directly into the feed. The company will also soon allow parents to control how much time their kids and teens can spend scrolling Shorts. They will also have the ability to set the timer to ‘zero’.

He also talked about a new AI feature coming to YouTube which will allow for the creation of games using a simple text prompt. The streaming giant already offers creators a number of AI features to enable content generation. This includes the Edit with AI feature in the YouTube Create app, AI-enabled auto-dubbing in 20+ languages and Dream Screen for AI-generated video and image backgrounds for Shorts.

Mohan also shared that over 20 million users gained more insights on the content they were watching using the company's Ask tool, which is the AI-powered button that shows below videos to allow users to ask questions about the content they are watching.

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