YouTube's New AI Features Watches Videos for You

Let us understand this. YouTube is testing new AI features that will basically watch a video for you and even go through the comments and organize them for your consumption.


We know artificial intelligence is making its way into every aspect of our lives, but this is getting weird. One of the new tools lets users ask questions about the videos or type in some commands, such as "Summarize the video" and "Recommend related content."

Cool. Now, you can let AI tell you what's in the video while you do something else. Who needs to actually "view" video content anyway? That's so "yesterday's news."

Another new AI helper takes care of the time it takes to read the comments on the video. This handy little feature will summarize comments and organize them into batches of comments in topics, which will be handy for creators who want a better handle on what their audience is looking for.

For viewers, this is a way to get an overview of the comments without, you know, actually reading them.

YouTube says, "To help you easily understand and participate in comment conversations, we're experimenting with AI that organizes large comment sections of long-form videos into easily digestible themes."

We're only mere human beings, so "easily digestible" is probably necessary. And who better to do it than some AI entity that knows far better than we do?

Like all good AI, this one will converse with you. As you explore the content you're watching (or let AI do it), you can take advantage of your chatty artificial friend by getting all your questions about the video answered, recommendations for further viewing, and even quizzes for some academic videos, all without stopping playback.

YouTube wants to be clear that these features are experimental, so your experience may not be the best it can be. The platform only allows limited availability for now, as it collects feedback to determine how to improve it. According to the company, "Each experiment allows you to submit feedback directly in the tool," so, hey, at least they aren't completely abandoning human input.

At this rate, it won't be long before we can cue up a bunch of videos for AI to watch, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning for a summary while we sip our coffee.

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