On its 20th birthday, YouTube is unrecognizable as the scrappy video site that began as the domain of young amateur users publishing unpolished, low-budget clips.
Commanding 2.7 billion users, including celebrities like British pop star Dua Lipa who share professional-grade content, YouTube has become the most popular way for Americans to watch TV and is expected to eclipse industry leader Disney's media revenue this year.
On Tuesday at the company's annual Made on YouTube product launch event, executives at the platform - owned by Alphabet's Google - laid out a vision of how YouTube planned to dominate the airwaves in the coming decades: with AI.
YouTube spent much of the event championing its video creators as the future of media who could now work without constraints placed by media executives. They would be helped, instead, by a host of artificial intelligence-enabled tools that would either reimagine the production process or create new content entirely - a concept that Hollywood fought against during a months-long strike in 2023.
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and other presenters dismissed the idea, reiterating that the rapid expansion of AI capabilities would not replace the jobs of content creators.
"These are tools, and really just that," Mohan said. "Make no mistake: no studio, network, tech company, or AI tool will own the future of entertainment."
Read more | REUTERS