YouTube Shorts gets sprinkled with Google DeepMind’s AI magic: Veo for generating video is here

YouTube says that “success isn’t one-size-fits-all” and offers “long-lasting opportunities to forge your own path to success”. In other words, YouTube is pumping out more AI tools.

– YouTube Official Blog, September 2024

The Dream Screen feature that was introduced more than a year ago, is now getting AI-boosted. Dream Screen lets you generate backgrounds limited “only by your imagination” (as the video platform puts it) in YouTube Shorts. Now, YouTube will integrate Google DeepMind’s most capable model for generating video, Veo, into YouTube Shorts later this year. For context, Google’s DeepMind is behind the AlphaGo software sensation that made headlines in 2016 after beating a champion in the complex board game Go.

So, what does Veo do? According to the YouTube blog post, you’ll be able to create even more incredible video backgrounds, “breathing life into concepts that were once impossible to visualize”, as they put it:

And for the first time, users will be able to generate 6-second standalone video clips for Shorts with the help of Veo. “For example, if you’re looking through your footage and feel like you’re missing something to help tie it all together, you can effortlessly generate a singular clip that fits right in with the content you’ve already captured”, the post explains.

Of course, these creations will be watermarked using SynthID, and we’ll apply a label that clearly communicates to viewers it was generated with AI.

SynthID watermarks and identifies AI-generated content by embedding digital watermarks directly into AI-generated images, audio, text, or video. For pictures and videos, it’s actually very cool: SynthID adds a digital watermark that’s imperceptible to the human eye directly into the pixels of an AI-generated image or to each frame of an AI-generated video.