YouTube is reportedly testing a new video search results carousel that uses AI to highlight clips from videos. According to Google, the highlighted clips are ones that will be the most helpful for the search query. Essentially, the AI overviews will show the user the information they seek without the user clicking on a video.
Currently, this feature is available for a small number of YouTube Premium members in the US for queries in English, with the AI-generated results being more likely to appear when the user searches for information on products or locations. Some example queries mentioned by the company include “best noise cancelling headphones” and “museums to visit in San Francisco”. Unlike the AI overviews in Google Search, however, the AI will not provide summaries of the videos and instead will only show clips from them.
New game for you all: ask google what a made-up phrase means.
YouTube’s implementation of AI overviews differs from the one in Google Search, but the underlying idea is the same: providing users with easy access to information without any additional clicks. At the moment, it is unclear how the AI determines which information is useful, but at the very least it probably won’t try to confidently explain nonexistent sayings.
Previously, internet users have discovered that they can make Google AI explain nonsense phrases like “you can’t lick a badger twice”. By attaching the word “meaning” at the end of a made-up phrase, the AI overview will attempt to prescribe a meaning for the phrase, treating it like a known idiom or saying. This is more or less another example of AI making things up, but fortunately in this instance it has only led to another internet trend.
