YouTube just made it a lot easier to get creative with your videos. A new set of AI tools, powered by Google, is now available inside YouTube Shorts. These features are designed to help you bring your ideas to life quickly and easily, even if you have no editing experience.
With these updates, you can animate photos, turn doodles into short clips, and explore a new creative space called the AI Playground. Everything is built into the Shorts editor, making it simple to experiment and have fun.
One of the most exciting tools is the photo-to-video feature. You can select any picture from your camera roll, and the AI will automatically add smooth motion effects, such as pans or zooms, to transform it into a short animated video. This feature is already live in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. More countries will get access soon.
YouTube is also adding playful AI effects. You can draw a quick sketch and watch it come to life, or use filters that make you look like you are underwater or standing next to your digital twin. These are available in the “Effects” tab and are designed to make your Shorts more personal and fun.
To help you explore these tools, YouTube has introduced the AI Playground. It brings all the new features together in one place, along with sample prompts and videos to help you get inspired. Whether you want to try something simple or create something more complex, this is where you can start.
In a post, Sarah Ali, Vice President of Product Management for YouTube Shorts and Creation Experiences, said, “We’re sharing some of our newest creation tools to make bringing your ideas to life on YouTube Shorts even easier and more fun. Photo-to-video and generative effects are powered by Veo 2, and we’re excited to bring Veo 3 to YouTube Shorts later this summer.”
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YouTube has also confirmed that videos created with these tools will be clearly labelled. Each one will include a digital watermark called SynthID, developed by Google DeepMind, to show when AI has been used. This is part of YouTube’s effort to make sure AI content is transparent and responsible.
YouTube Shorts is growing fast, with over 200 billion daily views. And the updates are not stopping here. Later this summer, YouTube plans to roll out Veo 3, an upgraded model that can create even more realistic visuals and allow users to generate entire videos from just a few lines of text.
Whether you are animating a photo, reworking a selfie or turning a sketch into a shareable video, these new tools are made to help you create faster, easier and with more freedom—all right inside the YouTube app.
