YouTube execs weigh in on AI safeguards, Living Room app changes, and Pat McAfee’s move to ESPN

After YouTube announced new creator tools and product updates at its Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, CEO Neal Mohan stressed that security, particularly around updated AI tools, remains “a priority” for the tech giant.

“YouTube is in a really unique space,” he explained during an onstage Q&A at the end of the event. “We have the opportunity to work very closely with cutting-edge technologies that YouTube has invented, with sister organizations like Google DeepMind.” The company has moved to a place where it is “deploying these technologies very incrementally rather than just putting them online and seeing what happens.”

As for the potential abuses of AI, Mohan continued: “It’s really what the name says. It’s a tool. It’s about streamlining” the creative process.

In a separate interview with reporters after Mohan’s Q&A, executives were asked how AI tools would react if a creator were to type in, say, “Kamala Harris.” With the election just weeks away, concerns remain high that deepfakes, or misleading images and videos, could skew the vote. (Politics, unsurprisingly, didn’t come up during the hour-and-a-half presentation.)

Mary Ellen Coe, chief commercial officer, said that “anything that is created by creators with the tools is subject to our community guidelines, so they will be subject to our same trust and safety systems.” She added that if the content is synthetically generated, “it is automatically labeled as such.”

Amjad Hanif, YouTube’s vice president of product management and fan funding, said the addition of “Kamala Harris” to the tool would prompt him to question whether that result actually matches something that already exists. He explained: “We designed the technology to be able to identify, for example, if this mimics or really resembles something that already exists and we don’t want you to create things that already exist and other people’s intellectual property. Creators can create things across a wide spectrum. We tend to let creators create and use the tools as they would, but the pressure and the responsibility is on those creators to be discreet about what they create and what they post. We have certain safeguards around things that we don’t want the tool to be used for. That line is always a little blurry and it’s something we’re constantly defining.”

On a less ominous note, Coe was asked about the company’s efforts to have its creators recognized by the Television Academy with Emmy nominations. Mohan made that campaign the centerpiece of his remarks at Brandcast’s annual presentation to advertisers last May, underscoring the company’s confidence in the quality of its programming.

Ultimately, “we didn’t learn anything” from those films, Coe said with a laugh. “We still believe they’re making incredible content. I think it’s independent filmmaking and storytelling. With such a wide range of scripted and unscripted programming out there, we think it’s going to be picked up. The fans love it and the boards are going to have to take that into account.”

She credits Pat McAfee’s success on YouTube as proof that content from YouTube creators should be treated the same as traditionally produced content. Coe said McAfee called her before he signed a licensing deal with ESPN, which allows the Disney-owned sports division to simulcast his popular show on YouTube and also integrate the host into some of its other programming. The fact that his show has thrived on ESPN while remaining a major draw on YouTube is a testament to the evolution of media, Coe said.

“We were very supportive of him signing a contract with ESPN. College Game Day “It’s fantastic,” she said. “It’s a recognition of the talent, that these independent artists, these creators, these studios are able to find an audience. We’re a mechanism that connects them directly with their fans and it doesn’t necessarily have to go through a studio. It’s a very simple concept.”

Coe and Hanif agreed that a major product update announced at Made on YouTube — an update to the show’s app that will soon organize YouTube channels by seasons and episodes — will also help the awards cause. That said, the company has no intention of weighing the pros and cons and favoring only a select few by organizing the app a certain way, they said. “We want new creators to emerge and be discovered even if they’re not ready to be Emmy-worthy and episode-worthy,” Hanif said.