YouTube is running a recent test to auto-generate video summaries with the usage of AI. As noted on the support page, the summaries have begun appearing on the watch and search pages, but are only available for a limited variety of English-language videos and viewers.

The video platform explains that the AI auto-generated summaries provide a fast overview of a video, letting the user resolve if it’s the precise one for them. Nevertheless, YouTube also notes, “While we hope these summaries are helpful and offer you a fast overview of what a video is about, they don’t replace video descriptions (that are written by creators!).”

No screenshots of the experiment were shared, so we’re undecided how viewers will differentiate a user-created video summary from one which was written by AI.

AI-powered YouTube video summarizer tools exist already, including Clipnote.ai, Skipit.ai and Scrivvy, amongst others. Nevertheless, some YouTube creators say these tools fail to summarize longer videos.

“On my longer videos, it was complete nonsense,” wrote one Reddit user about Clipnote.ai. “It mostly just copied the primary lines of what I had in my description. It mainly served zero purpose. I used to be just curious to see if it could write a greater description than I did, however it sadly performed horribly.”

Overall, it’s too early to inform how the AI summaries will affect YouTube creators and if it’ll actually help write their video summaries. But we’re curious to see how well the most recent experiment performs and if it gets a wider rollout.

The AI auto-generated video summaries join YouTube’s other AI initiatives, akin to AI-generated quizzes for educational videos and an AI-powered dubbing tool. Furthermore, parent company Google recently announced more AI tools, like an AI-assisted note-taking app and AI-generated backgrounds for Google Meet calls.