By Ann-Marie Alcántara

YouTube is entering its AI era.

The streaming platform is offering Veo 3 -- Google's new AI video generator that's giving game developers and filmmakers jitters -- to normal users for making short videos starting Tuesday, along with other AI upgrades to the popular app.

Users will be able to make eight-second vertical videos in an unending range of styles and tones. The company also announced other AI tools for Shorts like video editing, adding objects and motion to a video, or stylizing it with different artistic looks. In addition, people can take a line of dialogue from a video and turn it into a song.

Connecting the Veo 3 video generator to YouTube will give people another way to introduce AI-generated content (and potentially slop) to social media. Users in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and several other countries will get access first. The videos will be labeled as AI-generated in their description text, but YouTube isn't offering a filter to limit AI videos from your Shorts feed.

Released in May and available to paying Google AI subscribers, Veo 3 was met with a mixture of awe and apprehension from people across industries because of its advanced capabilities and ability to generate matching video and sound.

"We've seen tons of interesting things that we had no idea were going to happen with the Veo launch," said Eli Collins, vice president of product at Google DeepMind. "People's imaginations on the internet are pretty unlimited."

When we gave the YouTube team prompts to generate video, the shorts came out visually impressive, especially for one-off takes with no trial and error. You can see one embedded in this article. (It isn't flawless: The woman's mouth moves when there's no audible dialogue.)

This integrated version of Veo 3 is streamlined for ease of use and speed. It delivers at a lower resolution than the paid version, and it requires less fiddling.

AI is also coming to podcasting on YouTube, a place that became the most popular platform for podcast listeners last year. Users will get suggestions from AI on what parts of a video podcast to turn into clips and Shorts, as well as the ability to turn audio into video for those who focus on audio-first podcasts.

Whether users will welcome more AI content and tools in their feeds remains a mystery, say analysts, but companies continue to build and promote them nonetheless.

Meta released a stand-alone AI app in April and plans to allow brands to create and target ads using AI by the end of next year. OpenAI plans to release a feature-length movie made largely with AI next year. And Google's own Gemini AI app recently surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT to become the top free app on Apple's App Store.

"People will say they don't like and they distrust AI-generated content, " said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Emarketer. "While that certainly may be true, it doesn't mean they're not engaging with it."

Write to Ann-Marie Alcántara at ann-marie.alcantara@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 16, 2025 10:30 ET (14:30 GMT)

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