To enhance user experience and video discovery, YouTube has embarked on an experimental phase of auto-generating video summaries using artificial intelligence (AI).
Set to appear on watch and search pages. These AI auto-generated summaries, initially reported by Android Police, aim to offer viewers a concise understanding of a video’s content, assisting in their decision to watch it.
AI Auto-Generated Summaries Vs. Video Descriptions
Despite the novel feature, the platform reiterated that these summaries are not intended to replace video descriptions crafted by creators.
YouTube’s foray into AI-powered summaries remains confined to several English-language videos and viewers.
This move comes as part of the platform’s testing of experimental features to validate the effectiveness of AI-generated content within the YouTube platform.
The primary intent is to ascertain whether these AI summaries prove beneficial in providing a quick and accurate overview of video content.
For marketers, this advancement signifies a potential shift in optimizing video content.
As the summaries become more prevalent and possibly influence viewers’ decisions, tailoring content to align with AI-generated summaries could become another strategic facet of SEO.
How AI Summaries Could Affect Creators
The experimental feature raises several questions, such as how much control creators will have over AI summaries and how those summaries affect video rankings.
Also, what if AI produces an inaccurate summary that deters potential viewers from choosing that video?
What if that summary is so inaccurate that it harms the creator’s reputation? And, if not editable by the creator, how quickly could the summary be fixed?
Marketers should keep an eye on this development. It could necessitate changes in video descriptions, keywords, and overall content strategy to ensure that YouTube’s AI features can reliably understand and summarize video content for more views from interested audiences.
How To Preview AI Summaries Of YouTube Content
The experiment is only available on select videos. In the meantime, creators can learn how AI could interpret YouTube content with Chrome extensions and Google-PaLM.
Google Bard suggested the following approaches. It also said it would be happy to create the summary but realized it could not.
Screenshot from Google Bard, August 2023Here’s an example of a Chrome extension using OpenAI technology in action.
Screenshot from YouTube/Eightify, August 2023Poe also offers a bot for Google-PaLM that will give brief YouTube video summaries.
Screenshot from Poe, August 2023This could give you a clearer insight into how Google-PaLM understands your YouTube video content. It will also give you the time to modify your video strategy, just in case YouTube decides to implement this feature in a future rollout.
Featured image: Jirapong Manustrong/Shutterstock