The first experiment involves an AI tool aimed at organizing large comment sections on long-form videos. This tool will enable content creators to categorize comment sections by topic, highlight specific comments, and even delete comments related to a particular topic.
This is only available on a select few English videos that have a high volume of comments. For now, the ability to participate is limited to YouTube Premium members who manually enable the experimental feature. The goal is to test out the new comment rating system before potentially expanding it to more videos and users in the future.
The second experiment is a generative AI chatbot designed to engage with viewers while they watch videos. Similar to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, this chatbot aims to provide answers to viewers’ questions about the video, recommend related content, and offer increased interactivity without interrupting playback.
It can even create quizzes for users watching specific academic videos. Currently, this experiment is active for a limited number of people on a subset of videos. YouTube plans to expand its availability to Premium subscribers in the U.S. on the Android platform in the coming weeks.
While these new features may be welcomed by YouTube users, it’s important to note the lack of public testing for AI systems that interact with the general public and audio/video content on a large scale.
Google acknowledges that these features are experimental and that they may not always be perfect. The company will be closely monitoring the outputs produced by generative AI systems as they navigate the challenges and potential unpredictability of this technology.
As the testing progresses, it’ll be interesting to see how Google refines and implements these AI systems to enhance the YouTube experience for both creators and viewers.
