YouTube has outlined some coming improvements to its “Inspiration” tab, which are designed to provide more guidance as to what you should be creating in order to maximize engagement and interest among your audience.
YouTube renamed the “Research” tab in YouTube Studio to “Inspiration” back in June, and has since added a range of generative AI tools to the feature, in order to help creators maximize their content performance.
And soon, you’ll have even more AI elements to try out within this suggestions element.
As you can see in this example, within the updated Inspiration panel, you’ll initially see five ideas that YouTube’s AI system has generated for your channel specifically. These are based on your channel’s content, audience, and response to trending concepts in your niche.
As per YouTube:
“We’ll show you the idea thumbnail, a potential title for the idea, and a quick summary of what the idea is about, and even the potential audience interest, so you can see how each of these different ideas will resonate with your existing audience.”
You’ll also be able to use the prompt box to generate more ideas, using YouTube’s systematic understanding of key trends to help you come up with more video concepts.
Which could be putting too much reliance on AI, and you can see how some YouTubers are going to use this to effectively automate creativity. But the idea is that these prompts will help to get you thinking of relevant angles that’ll resonate with your audience, and not to use these as prescriptive guidance within themselves.
“Once you find an idea that interests you, you can select it, and we’ll take you to the “Idea Playground”. This page allows you to really make the idea your own. We can provide some custom angles to show you different takes on the same idea, and you can either choose one of these, and see the idea update in real time, or type your own prompt to customize the whole idea.”
There’s even a collection of AI-generated thumbnail concept art options to consider, as well as video titles.
Again, this does feel like a little too much AI, like concepts by robot committee. But given that these notes are based on related YouTube content trends, and your audience response, the intention is that this will take the work out of doing your content research, and guide you towards concepts that spark your own human imagination.
I do personally have concerns about the expansion of content automation, and how this could lead to less experimentation, less creativity, and a less interesting internet overall. But conceptually, it does make sense to utilize these tools to at least consider what your next clip should be.
The robots won’t always be right, but maybe, there will be tips and notes that can help to get you thinking.
YouTube says that it’s currently testing these new elements with selected users, with a view to launching them to all creators “over the next few months.”
You can check out more about YouTube’s updated Inspiration tab here.