With AI video generation advancing rapidly, YouTube is shifting from relying solely on creators to mark their AI-made content—now the platform will automatically tag such videos itself. In a Wednesday announcement, the company revealed that its internal detection systems will apply labels whenever they identify "significant photorealistic AI" usage. These labels will also become more noticeable, appearing clearly on both standard long-form videos and YouTube Shorts.

AI labeling on YouTube has been around for over two years, following an update to the platform’s AI policies and the introduction of a Creator Studio tool. That tool required creators to disclose if their videos contained AI-generated content that could be mistaken for a real person, place, or event. Videos featuring clearly fantastical or animated scenarios—like a unicorn trotting through a magical landscape—were exempt from labeling. YouTube emphasizes that its labeling policy hasn't changed, but it is now taking a more active enforcement role.

This development comes on the heels of Google’s release of Gemini Omni, a new family of multimodal AI models unveiled at its Google I/O developer conference last week. These models can produce high-quality videos that demonstrate an understanding of physics, culture, history, and science. Starting in May, YouTube will leverage new internal signals to detect and label AI-generated content. Creators are still expected to disclose their AI use, but if they fail to do so, YouTube will apply the label automatically. If a creator believes their content was misidentified, they can update the disclosure status—but they cannot remove labels if the content was made using YouTube's own AI tools, such as Veo or Dream Screen. Labels will also be permanently attached to videos that contain C2PA metadata indicating full AI generation. (Recently, OpenAI committed to the C2PA standard, joining Nvidia, Kakao, and Eleven Labs.)

The automatic detection feature follows YouTube’s recent expansion of AI deepfake detection, which now allows any adult to scan the platform for face matches. This capability was initially tested with celebrities, public figures, politicians, and other creators. YouTube also plans to make its AI labels more consistent and prominent. Previously, labels appeared in the expanded description, except for sensitive topics like health or news, where a prominent label was placed directly on the video. Now, for long-form videos, labels will appear directly below the video player and above the description; for Shorts, they will overlay directly on the video.

The company stated that repositioning the labels will make them more obvious to viewers encountering photorealistic, AI-altered, or AI-generated content. For videos that are only slightly altered, animated, or unrealistic—such as the prancing unicorn example—the label will still appear only in the expanded description. Notably, YouTube confirmed that AI labels will not affect a video's recommendations or its ability to generate revenue.

Beyond policing AI content, YouTube has been investing in AI for other features, including its interactive search tool Ask YouTube, a playlist generator for YouTube Music, AI video summaries, and various generative AI creation tools.