The bar is being raised on YouTube, and honestly, it's about time. AI spam has, as many have probably noticed, become a bit of a plague. People are fed up with mass-produced content featuring monotone voices, recycled templates, and soulless still images.
To stem the flood of auto-generated garbage, bland, barely human-sounding content Google is now tightening the rules of its Partner Programme starting July 15th. This move will make it pretty much impossible for these channels to profit from their so-called "creations." At least not through Google.
This isn't about censoring react videos (unfortunately) or clip compilations. Those formats are staying put. What YouTube is targeting is the worst of the worst: AI-narrated spam over autogenerated visuals. Communications chief Rene Ritchie describes the change as a "minor adjustment," but the goal is clearly to improve the user experience in a big way.
The update also gives YouTube more power to clean out the heaps of low-effort AI content, of which there's way too much. In the long run, that should help restore a bit of credibility to the platform. All in all, it's a small step in the right direction.
Are you sick of all the AI spam on YouTube? And what do you think about the platform finally cracking down on it?
<social>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqMijeuaWik</social>