Peggy K's Creator Weekly: YouTube Shorts Thumbs, AI versus Human Creativity, Google Photos Search

Another week, another big list of updates! This week there are new features from YouTube, Twitch, Beehiiv, Google Photos, Google Search, and more. And, of course, AI.

Top news and updates this week

• Add texts and filters to YouTube Shorts thumbnails. 

• YouTube is working on safeguards against deepfakes and other AI technology.

• YouTube published a new FAQ about Invalid Activity for channels in the YouTube Partner Program (it may not be satisfying, but it is useful information.

• Twitch Partners and Affiliates have an updated Ads Manager to control advertising in their videos.

• Twitch updated their Clips editor for easier mobile sharing. 

• Spotter Studio is a new AI-powered service for YouTubers. 

• TikTok added a profile search. 

• Beehiiv updated their post editor.

• Medium explained how Boosts and distribution work.

• Google Photos added everyday language search and has Gemini “Ask Photos” in early access.

• Canva has significantly raised their prices.

• Google Search people searches now show a carousel of social media posts from multiple platforms. 

• Instagram has added a ton of new features, including Notes and new DM sharing options.

• X is losing advertisers, is full of hate content and was banned in Brazil. 

• Millions of Brazilian X users have moved to Bluesky. 

• Google Meet has updated the Android meeting interface.

• Google Drive updates their personalized home page.

• Plus interesting reading on Russian-backed influencers, photographers, political ads for Gen Z, streaming fraud, behind the scenes at Gmail and more.

Read on for details and additional updates!

To Do & Try

There’s a new Beetlejuice Effect in the YouTube Shorts editor, timed for the release of the new Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie. Post it with the hashtag #BeetlejuiceOnShorts.

Add Text & Effects to YouTube Shorts Thumbnails

YouTube Shorts got a much-requested feature this week. You can now edit the thumbnail to add text and effects, even after the video is uploaded.

YouTube Shorts do not have an option to upload an image as the thumbnail. Instead, when you use the Shorts editor in the YouTube mobile app, you can select a frame from the video as the thumbnail. 

This update lets you customize the thumbnail: 

• Add text

• Use image filters to change the look

• Select and edit the thumbnail image after uploading the Short

That means you can now upload your Short on desktop and then switch to the YouTube app to select the thumbnail and add text.

Note the thumbnails do not show in the Shorts feed, but do show on channel pages, the Home feed, subscriber feed and when you share the Short to other platforms.

More details from Creator Insider. Demo from the YouTube Creators channel.

AI and Human Creativity

There is an ongoing discussion about AI tools and whether they can (or should) replace human creativity. Unfortunately the term “AI” is really vague, used to cover everything from spell checkers to tools that create videos from a text prompt. That makes it difficult to discuss “is using AI OK” when some people mean using AI to create a new work and others mean using AI tools to support their creative process (and some people intentionally don’t clarify what they do mean).

A big topic of discussion this week among writers has been the controversy around the NaNoWriMo organization’s statement on AI. NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in November. There are no prizes and no winners, other than people meeting their personal goals. 

The NaNoWriMo nonprofit organization made a statement that condemnation of AI was “classist” and “ableist”. Writers were insulted by the implication that disabled people need generative AI tools to write, especially when many of those tools have been trained on authors’ works without their permission. (There’s a lot more detail about the troubles around the NaNoWriMo organization in this video.)

Writers, photographers, video makers and other creatives seem mostly fine with using AI-powered tools that can check spelling, remove noise, or brainstorm titles. Few are OK with companies using their work to train AI models that are promoted as being able to replace human creative work. And as the ability to use generative AI tools to churn out stories and photos and videos has gotten faster and easier, platforms have been flooded with this often problematic content.

YouTube, for its part, seems to be sensitive to those concerns, both for big record labels and individual creators. While they have confirmed they use at least some YouTube content for AI training, they say they want to do so “responsibly”. 

As we have for many years, we use content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers across YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI applications. We do this consistent with the terms that creators agree to. This encompasses powering our Trust & Safety operations, improving our recommendation systems, and developing new generative AI features like auto dubbing. 

 To those ends YouTube announced a number of safeguards it is working on: 

• Technology within Content ID that identifies AI clones of singers’ voices. 

• Technology that identifies “deepfake” images that use the face of specific creators and artists. 

• Blocking unauthorized access and scraping of content. 

• “developing new ways to give YouTube creators choice over how third parties might use their content on our platform”.

• YouTube’s AI tools may “block prompts that violate our policies or touch on sensitive topics”.

And they reiterated that their goal isn’t to replace human creativity:
As AI evolves, we believe it should enhance human creativity, not replace it. We’re committed to working with our partners to ensure future advancements amplify their voices, and we’ll continue to develop guardrails to address concerns and achieve our common goals.

It remains to be seen if that will be achieved.

Related: 

Nebula, the creator-owned video platform, published their own statement on AI that says they won’t use AI tools trained on “unethically sourced” data, that replace human creativity, or that make people lazy, rather than “better”. “Doing things faster is only useful if what gets done is just as good as if we had taken our time.”

Science fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote an article for the New Yorker on Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art. “...art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.”

The Verge has a shareable explainer: Hello, you’re here because you compared AI image editing to Photoshop 

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube has a new FAQ on Invalid Traffic. YouTube Partners are often frustrated that their earnings are removed or on hold due to invalid activity, but don’t have any way to fix it. The new FAQ notes that creators may not have control over such traffic when it comes from bots. The good news is that it’s unlikely to be caused by allowing embeds, adding mid-roll ads or using the Promotions tab.

Twitch Partners and Affiliates have access to a new “ad minutes per hour” slider in Ads Manager that makes it easier to control ad breaks. The other ad controls have been reorganized to make them easier to find and manage.

Last week Twitch updated their Clips editor to automatically create vertical clips for mobile sharing. They will also add a setting to allow viewers to share Clips to their TikTok and YouTube accounts.  I covered this in last week’s Creator Weekly Live. Check it out here.

Spotter Studio just launched out of beta. This is a platform for YouTubers that offers personalized AI brainstorming of video concepts, titles and thumbnails; project planning;  and audience research. They say that users have up to 49% more video views after using the platform for a week. There’s a free trial. It’s currently only available in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. Passionfruit has more about how it trains its AI tools on a creator’s content and how it works.

Tubefilter reports: Some big streamers are leaving YouTube for Twitch. Does data say that's the right move? 

TikTok has added Profile Search to find your own posts, reports from other accounts and posts you’ve liked or favorited.

If you have teens in your family check out updates for TikTok and YouTube: 

• TikTok and the Family Online Safety Institute partner to launch Digital Safety Partnership For Families 

• A collaborative approach to teen supervision on YouTube 

• Expanding our support for teen wellbeing on YouTube across Europe 

Web Publishers and Search

At SEO Roundtable, Barry Schwartz interviewed Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan. Among other things, he acknowledged that Google’s ranking systems “are not doing a good enough job” for some small sites that are producing good content, and they are working on that. Sullivan added in a LinkedIn post: “one of the other things that I thought was really, really insightful from looking at this feedback, was better understanding a world of, where it’s often seen as all SEO, that you’ve got a whole group of creators that who have nothing to do with SEO, want nothing to do with SEO, don’t know SEO. They just want to create great content. And that’s great because we want to reward that, and we should be doing a better job of rewarding that.” 

Beehiiv announced a new and improved post builder, making it easier to publish both email newsletters and corresponding blog posts. They are also making “Draft Links” available, so you can share your post before it’s published. This is currently only available in early access, but should roll out more widely soon. 

If you post on Medium read How does story distribution work on Medium? to understand how stories are Boosted (by humans!) and distributed, and why you might be getting as many views as you expect.

Photos and Image Design

Google Photos now lets you search for photos in your library using natural language (“Alice and me laughing” or “colorful sunsets”). You can sort the results by relevance or most recent. They are also giving early access to Gemini AI-powered “Ask Photos” to select US users (join the waitlist here), that lets you ask questions about your photos (“What did we eat at the hotel in London?” or “top 10 things we saw in Idaho”). See the privacy information for Gemini in Photos for more details.

Canva is raising prices on Canva Teams from $120 per year for up to five users to $500 per year ($100 per team member, minimum 3 members). Prices were raised in April, but existing users are only being moved to the new plans now. Canva says the higher prices are worth it, especially with their new suite of AI tools. It’s not clear if current users will pay or move on. I have a free Canva account with a legacy team that cannot be changed without incurring the new fees. The only way to keep the team with a paid plan is to pay at least $300 per year, which is well beyond my budget. 

Social Media

If you search for a person in Google Search, they may now show a carousel of posts from Threads, X, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

Lia Haberman rounds up the “State of Instagram” with all this year’s updates so far. What is striking to me is all the ways you can now leave notes on Reels, Stories and Posts - it’s a different way to engage.

Instagram DMs now have new chat themes, doodles and stickers on shared photos, photo cutouts and birthday notes.

Ben Werdmuller suggests Threads is trading trust for growth with its secretive invite-only creator program, which encourages engagement-bait type posting.

CNN reports that 26% of marketers expect to decrease ad spending on X, and only 4% believe X provides brand safety. This doesn’t seem good for X.

Zoe Williams at The Guardian writes Racism, misogyny, lies: how did X become so full of hatred? And is it ethical to keep using it? 

Casey Newton: X gets banned in Brazil 

After a huge influx of new users from Brazil, Bluesky shared an overview of features for new users. If you’ve been thinking about joining Bluesky (or just want to know more about how it works) read the English version.

Communication and Collaboration

Google Meet now looks better on Android phones and tablets, with less unused space around the margins and a “sleeker” user interface.

The Google Drive machine learning-powered home page will now show both suggested files and folders and has enhanced search filters to make finding content easier. (Is “machine learning” actually different from “AI” in this context?)

More AI Updates and News

From The Verge: US, EU, UK, and others sign legally enforceable AI treaty 

From Social Media Today: X Excludes EU Users from xAI Training Set 

If you have access to Google Gemini Gems, Google shared 5 tips on getting started with Gems, your custom AI experts 

More Reading (and watching)

Jay Kuo: Russia Bought the Right. “Two Russian nationals were named as defendants, but far more importantly, they funneled nearly $10 million through shell companies to a Tennessee-based company called Tenet Media—the home of several high profile right wing influencers. These influencers, with millions of fans online, were paid to promote pro-Russian stories, particularly around Ukraine. The stories included blatant misinformation, including attempts to falsely blame Ukraine for terror attacks in Moscow.” 

And, probably not surprisingly, these stories were amplified by the owner of X. 

Related from Taylor Lorenz: Stop letting right wing influencers cosplay as ‘independent’ media 

Learn about 20th century photographers shared in the Flickr Commons: Flickr Foundation – Meet the photographers! 

Are ads like this effective? I’m not the target audience, so it probably doesn’t matter that they seem bizarre to me: Kamala Harris Campaign Experiments With Ads for an Audience With “Brain Rot” 

This is bots listening to bot-created music, generating millions in royalties:  FBI Arrests Musician For Streaming Fraud, Claiming He Collected $10M From Hundreds Of Thousands AI-Generated Songs 

Catch up on “one of the worst and most pivotal events in modern internet culture”:  The Links x Hivemind Swarmed reading guide to Gamergate 

Elizabeth Laraki gives a “behind-the-scenes look at how Gmail's first UX designer thoughtfully shaped Gmail into a product for the people.”

Thanks for reading! 🌼