TubeTalk: Your YouTube How-To Guide

What Does Ownership Mean On YouTube Now

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We break down how YouTube’s new AI “reimagine” direction turns simple Shorts remixing into something that can reshape a creator’s likeness and meaning. We walk through the hidden default settings, the terms of service implications, and the real risks if voice cloning and monetisation collide with low-effort AI remixes. 
• Gemini Omni style reimagining and why it feels like a point of no return for creator control 
• Shorts remixing settings, why they are on by default, and why there is no channel-wide default 
• The difference between classic remixing and AI that changes the underlying video 
• Real remix examples, AI labels, and why “AI slop” is the predictable outcome of a low barrier 
• Likeness, privacy, and the moment voice cloning makes the problem much worse 
• Terms of service clauses that expand what “modify” can mean as new features ship 
• Monetisation power dynamics, ads on content, and what creators can realistically push back on 
• Third-party AI training setting and what it suggests about content ownership online 
You should leave us some comments below. If you're listening to the audio only podcast, you know, listen, you can send us a message. There's a link there to send us a text message. If you like this, feel free to hit that subscribe button. 


The Default Setting Most Miss

SPEAKER_03

But it says shorts remixing. Let others create shorts using content from this video. If you don't allow remixing, shorts remixed from this video will be permanently deleted. And here's the other. Oh my goodness, I didn't realise this moment. It is turned on by default. Every video you upload has it turned on. Allow video and audio remixing. And the other thing about this is that there is no channel default.

SPEAKER_01

I know what to do now!

SPEAKER_03

My likeness is still there, and I'm still looking at a phone, but some some clown has invaded my house, and he's watching some comedy with me. If we materially change this agreement, we'll provide you with reasonable advance notice and the opportunity to review the changes. Except, number one, when we launch a new product or feature. My simple brain interprets this as if we add a new feature that suddenly allows creators to use your likeness in whatever way they want, we don't need to tell you about it.

The AI Rubicon For Creators

SPEAKER_02

Hey, welcome to the only podcast that employs more bald creators than any other podcast in the world. I'm Travis, the baldiest one, and I'm here with the other baldiest one, Rob Wilson. Welcome.

SPEAKER_03

Travis, it's nice to know that you've remembered me fitting me in with all of your other guests.

SPEAKER_02

It's crazy. It's been really nuts lately. But if you're new here, sometimes we do this where we talk about YouTube news. And that's what we're going to do today with Rob Wilson from the main vid IQ channel. And today I think it's really important to talk about the fact that this isn't necessarily an update. It's more like a trend of what's been happening on YouTube over the last couple of months. It isn't so much that, like, oh, there's this new update tomorrow and you should go check it out. It's like if we look over the last year or so, the direction YouTube is going is very interesting and we wanted to break it down. Rob, what is this subject we're talking about today?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so it feels like with uh a recent feature, YouTubers cross what I might call uh terms of service Rubicon in some way. And what I mean by that is I think for a lot of people who are especially interested in and have opinions about AI, this is a point of no return. But I think as we discuss this, you know, we'll all have our opinions about this. I'd love to hear yours in the chat. And I want to try and approach this as kind of diplomatically and as neutral as possible because spoiler alert, I'm gonna talk about a feature. I've left it on, I'm happy for people to use this feature. But if one thing changes later on, then that might start making me question whether or not this feature is how do I put this um ethical? Yeah, and that's that's that's that's laying the groundwork. Oliver, like, ooh, I love the teaser.

SPEAKER_02

The teaser got me hooked. I'm here doing the podcast and I'm hooked already. Uh, if you're new here, this is what we do. We talk about uh YouTube updates and we also interview uh YouTube content creators. If you're listening to an audio-only podcast, there'll be a link to the video version of this podcast, mainly because we're gonna show some screen sharing things you're gonna want to see. So make sure uh you hop on over to the YouTube version of this for those segments. Um, okay. AI and YouTube has been something that's been inseparable for the past year. Whether you love it or hate it, it's here. It doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. And while some aspects of it are fine, for example, maybe helping you with titles and and and trying to help you figure out ideas, which we do here at VitIQ, link in the description. Um, there are things that YouTube is doing that really question what the value prop of YouTube is to a content creator versus what it was even just a year ago. So, you know, for the past couple of decades that YouTube's been around, it's you too. It's supposed to be content you make for other people. Um, the the side effect of that is sometimes people will make commentary on things, which is uh something that's protected uh by the copyright system. And that's something that doesn't change the content itself, it's just you're adding to it. You're you're you know, you are creating a new piece of content based off reacting to another piece of content or talking about another piece of content. AI has changed all that. We're not even talking about having the original piece of content be its thing and then you talking about it or whatever. It changes the original piece of content into something that you didn't make. And fundamentally, for creators, that feels weird. Um, let's talk about some examples. Rob, what do you what do you uh what do you got

Gemini Omni And Reimagined Shorts

SPEAKER_02

for us?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so it started, I think, one or two years ago with Dream Screen and Via 3. These were ones where you could use the YouTube Shorts app and prompt something in and it would generate it for you. But it would be something totally AI. You know, it wouldn't be a known person or a known event. It would be generating things out of its own lovely AI mind. But that has recently changed with some announcements that were made at the recent Google IO events, uh, which I think was in May or June, like as we're talking like maybe six weeks ago. And it's so it was this this bad boy here, Google AI. Ah, AI. It's AI IO 2026. And what I'm particularly interested in is this feature here, which we're gonna need a bit of visual commentary for. It's called Gemini Omni for shorts. And what this allows you to do is take an existing short, whatever is contained in that short, and then to use YouTube's vernacular, reimagine it. And the examples we're seeing on screen now is that somebody is doing some washing up, and they're taking this uh person and then turning them into a computer game character, which, okay, that's fine. Here's another example, though, where this same crit is doing some sort of funky dance, marching along the screen, and then somebody else is reimagining that to add themselves into this dance, then putting a head prop on the top, then turning him into pirates and so on and so forth. Like it is clear that the original premise of a video has been altered in significant ways. And you would describe these as the perfect YouTube examples where it kind of retains something from the original video and it looks pretty convincing, it looks fun, and it looks harmless, right? As demonstrated by YouTube.

SPEAKER_02

You know what's interesting is uh I kind of wish I had one of the um copyright lawyers on right now that I've had on. I've had two different ones on. Because now it's like you've taken a work, you've you've derived something new from it, but you've fundamentally changed what it is. Does that new piece of work, although I think I actually have the answer to this, does a new piece of work uh get covered by copyright? And I believe the last copyright lawyer I had on, and you guys can check this back out. I think he said anything made with AI doesn't get covered by copyright, I think. But in a case like this, where we're looking at, again, you this is a thing where you have to be watching the YouTube video, where you know you have two people kind of strutting down the street uh, you know, in with a background, and then you've literally replaced a person in it who wasn't in the video, and then now you're in a completely different place. Like it becomes a new video. So, A, who owns the copyright to that, if there even is one? B, like, at what point can you say, no, I don't want that? What if you are the content creator in this video and they replace someone in the video with someone you really don't like, a political figure, or just someone you don't like, someone you fundamentally have an issue with, and now you're dancing with them. Like that becomes a problem. Is there any safeguards to this? Like, what has YouTube said about this?

SPEAKER_03

The other circumstance I was thinking

Remixing Controls And No Channel Default

SPEAKER_03

about as well, which should be could be of uh great interest and concern, is what if the creator has passed away? And like they they they don't even have an opportunity to change these settings and prevent this from happening. Uh to answer your question, uh Travis, yes, there is. And it's an existing feature that's been on YouTube for quite a while now, and it's called shorts remixing. Right? I'm gonna just read out how it's described in the video details of what you upload. And this is quite deep into the settings. Like you, it's not obvious, you gotta know where it is and find it. But it says shorts remixing, let others create shorts using content from this video. If you don't allow remixing, shorts remixed from this video will be permanently deleted. And you've got two options allow video and audio remixing, or allow only audio remixing. So to a certain extent, you have to allow your content to be remixed if it is a YouTube short.

SPEAKER_02

Wow. Like there's no opt-out.

SPEAKER_03

There's no opt-out, right? Okay. And here's the other. Oh my goodness, I didn't realize this moment. It is turned on by default. Every video you upload has it turned on. Allow video and audio remixing. And the other thing about this is that there is no channel default. Like, so you can't just set this off and forget it. You've got to remember to turn this off every single uh video. In long form, these options do exist as well, but there is the option to completely turn it off, like no remixing whatsoever. But again, it's turned on by default.

SPEAKER_02

So there is a channel-wide for long form version of this?

SPEAKER_03

No, no, there's no channel-wide option at all. Wow. But for long-form content, you completely can completely turn off this feature if you like. But you've got to remember to do it with every single video that you upload. And retrospectively, you've got to go for your entire back catalogue to turn it all off, which you can do, but it's a it's a bit clunky, right? Now, previously, this wasn't too much of a big concern because the remixing was kind of using a video that was already on YouTube, but it wasn't altered in any way. Like you couldn't prompt it into something different. So you could maybe react to it, or you could um uh uh uh maybe uh add some commentary or some music to it. But it's I think the original video still stayed in place, but now with this new reimagine tool, Gemini Only, that you know ups the stakes at this point.

SPEAKER_02

I think also problematically is that someone takes your original work and then kind of changes somewhat, then they get the monetization from it, or is there or can they even be monetized? Can remixes be monetized?

SPEAKER_03

This is a really good question, and I I I haven't got a firm answer to this. My guess, but I I it's not obvious anywhere where it's listed at the moment. I probably should have done the research before uh joining this podcast, uh Travis. Thanks for asking the question. My guess is that the revenue goes to the reimaginer because it's on their channel.

SPEAKER_02

But I could be wrong, and I apologize if I'm but even if you're right, I mean some AI content isn't even monetizable, right? So I guess it would depend on what the monetization team says. But the thing is you can maybe trick it, monetize a channel with stuff that is monetizable, and then immediately start doing this sort of thing and then get it monetized. I guess. I mean, potentially, right? Um this creates a new environment for content creators on YouTube and sets a weird precedent, I feel. Um I don't know if other platforms are doing this, Instagram or or TikTok or whatever. Uh I don't know if they're doing it to this degree anyway. But it's almost like YouTube's like, you guys will love this, try this. Without really thinking about what the purpose is. I think when most people see this stuff, and we've seen examples of this, when they see it, they're like, oh, this is the I slot. You've actually done this your yourself, right? Like you have an example of yourself on this, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Yeah. When you think about um likeness and privacy, data protection, you know, if you think if you think about if this tool was introduced five years ago, I think there would have been a monumental backlash. And like nobody would have ever agreed to this. But you know, the the creative stakes have changed dramatically in those last three or four years. So, yeah, to give you an example here, Travis, we're gonna look at this short that has, I think, uh, somewhere in the region of three

AI Slop Versus Real Creativity

SPEAKER_03

million views. And what we're looking at is the original here, and it's something completely stupid. I just filmed a short that has me swiping through shorts very quickly and earning a view. Because again, YouTube did something a little weird a year a year ago. They changed from engaged views to just views, so like shorts creators can get a ton of views by just silliness, and this is what it uh sounds like and looks like.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_03

That is literally it, it's just me swiping on the phone saying yes, and I'm getting a view every time I do it every second. I don't know why that's gone viral. Um, maybe it's because uh I I that it was titled How to Get More YouTube Shorts Views in 2026, just a bit of a silly thing. But people have wanted to remix this video, reimagine it. As you can see on screen, at least 400 people have done that. Wow. Now we move on to how this has been remixed. Remember again the perfect example of where somebody was uh strutting down the street uh and somebody was added to it, we were added props. It looks kind of harmless, it looks kind of fun. Well, this is uh my version of that. And like, I don't know how how do we comment it on this, right? It's a bit weird, but let me just let me play it so you can hear how the original went. Was me just going, yes, yes, yes. Well, now it sounds like this.

SPEAKER_01

I see the screen perfectly clearly now. I know what to do now.

SPEAKER_02

You have three hands, you're holding a phone. I was gonna get to that, and you're clapping with two other hands.

SPEAKER_03

My likeness is still there. Yeah, yeah. I'm still looking at a phone, yeah. But some some clown has invaded my house. Um he's watching some comedy with me. Yeah, and as Travis says, I've I've found a new hand from somewhere uh as I'm clapping and watching the phone. And the only difference here is that, well, there's two differences that we can tell that it's AI. First of all, it doesn't sound like me. Right. That's really important. We'll get back to that in a second. And in the bottom corner, we have an AI label. Now, this is something good that YouTube have recently done. They used to bury their AI labels in video descriptions. Now they're putting these on top of the player, or I think it's like next to the title on long-form videos, so you can clearly see when something is AI generated. And this is probably down to a lot of, I guess, user feedback saying, hey, the current AI labels are just not sufficient. I mean, what are your thoughts on the this remix of me?

SPEAKER_02

So uh it come, you know, and I've seen comments on videos just like this where people call, oh, it's AI slop. It kind of is, right? So this is maybe a definitive version of AI slop. Uh AI voice, yeah, look at that. Yeah, it's just like it's not interesting. It doesn't even make sense. Like, if you're watching the video, what's happening is Rob's looking at a at his phone, and there's a clown over his shoulder who says, like, I what is he saying? I'm I can see exactly what's on your screen or whatever, which doesn't make any sense. Then you start clapping with a third hand, which is weird. Nothing about this is like this would have been interesting a year ago, or maybe even a little longer. Like, holy crap, look how realistic this looks. This is crazy. Sure, there's a third hand, but it's so amazing. Nowadays, we look at it, we go, this is just crap. This is just not like what is the purpose of this? It doesn't really it's it's not good. So, this is the type of thing that they are encouraging people to do um with this type of tool. I think when the engineers and stuff put this stuff together, they're hoping for something more creative and more imaginative. And I think, honestly, if I'm being perfectly honest, I think from YouTube's perspective, they're looking for good things out of this. What they're doing, though, is bringing the bar to entry so low that you get stuff like this. And that I think they know this is one of the things that'll happen, but they're hoping, I believe, that the majority of the content will be much better than this. And I don't think that's actually what's going to happen. I think you're gonna get a lot of this and very little of the thing they're looking for.

SPEAKER_03

I mean, yeah, absolutely. There is uh a need for decent prompting uh to produce the results, and I'm guessing this creator, quote unquote creator, uh just probably put in a very quick prompt of have a clown talk to this person and see what happens. Uh and that was pretty much the extent of their prompting. It you know, it would be interesting is if we could see what was prompted to get this result, but that's perhaps a little back-endy and not that useful to the average viewer. Uh like I'm only interested because it's what's being remixed. Well, you know the stats for nerds option you can do.

SPEAKER_02

Why not put it in there or something like a little subtext? Yeah.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

I guess for a little context, what we can say is that this we um can well can we see this uh views here, right? So yeah, thanks to our tool, uh the VidIQ scorecard, it can tell us that it's got 4,000 views. You know, that's broken the uh typical audience seed amount, like 1,500 views. It's got 31 likes, three comments. So it got some traction.

SPEAKER_02

And it got remixed once.

SPEAKER_03

Is that am I reading that right? Maybe maybe. Yeah. But yeah, going back to the original, I think there were 400 different remixes. Um there were some even crazier ones, like in some examples, it added hair to me, and there was a parrot jumping from shoulder to shoulder. I was dancing in one of them, like it's it's all absolute crazy nonsense. And you know, how you would build a channel out of remixing other people's content is uh another question entirely.

Voice Cloning Fears And What Comes Next

SPEAKER_02

I guess I want to ask how you felt as a content creator seeing this, seeing you doing things you didn't do in that original video. How does that feel?

SPEAKER_03

Uh for me, given how kind of silly and harmless it is, I'm kind of just like shrugging my shoulders and saying, Well, that's YouTube. But you know, if you if you offered this same predicament to somebody like Dan, I think Dan would be like, I didn't realize YouTube was gonna do to this to me, and I do not agree with it. I'm speaking for Dan here, but like I think you're probably right. We we just we we know Dan has um more uh reserved conservative views about yeah, which is perfectly fine. Like everybody's a a little different on the spectrum. Some people want to absolutely uh embrace it and use it whenever they can, and some people think it's like a it's the end of the world, it's an invasion of privacy. I'm not saying Dan's like on either end of that spectrum, but it it leans. It probably is, though, actually, if we're being honest, in a certain certain way, which is fine, there's you know, there's no problem with that. Yeah, so like for me at the moment it feels kind of harmless, but I think what would change all of that is if it could clone my voice. Yeah, because then people can get me to say whatever I want, yeah, and you know, if somebody is aware of who I am and what I actually sound like, and then they're seeing this uh AI content, maybe they'd miss that label, that becomes a big problem. Fortunately, I'm not that well known enough, and are YouTube gonna release tools that allow us to clone voices. That's a tricky one to answer. What I can tell you is that in uh Gemini, there is now a feature where you can upload an avatar similar to if you remember Sora, where you just had to say three numbers and then it would pick up your voice and try and turn it into content. Yeah, so that that that's recently come about in uh Gemini. So whether that's plugged into YouTube at some point, you just have to assume it will, yeah. Like this is here, so so why not go to whole hog and have complete avatars saying whatever they want on this platform?

SPEAKER_02

So then what's the audio remix then? The audio only remix?

SPEAKER_03

So that would be uh you saw you know, in this video where I'm just saying Yes, yeah. That would be just taking the audio of me going, yes, yes, yes, and then adding it to a uh shot that you record yourself.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, a different video. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, like people getting like famous like you might get the um a Martin Luther King I Have a Dream audio. You might kind of remix that into a video. That's that was what remixing was before. That you know that that felt like the more kind of acceptable, less invasive. But now it they've they've they've added the video version, but they've not necessarily combined the two yet to the point where it looks like me and it sounds like me. But I feel as if it's only a matter of time before that is the case, Travis.

SPEAKER_02

So I I feel like we are in a point where no one asked for this. So we're definitely gonna get more things that we didn't ask for. I I'm really curious why they decided to do this. I mean, I feel like YouTube feels like they need to use AI because they have it and it's the big thing. And whatever. But I also feel like I'm not sure if they know exactly why they're doing these things. They're doing them because they're neat. But how much is it pushing the platform in a way that viewers are going to enjoy? I don't know that viewers enjoy this.

SPEAKER_03

And I think their competitors their competitors, OpenAI, Grok, I think they're all doing it. So I I I assume that Google needs to be in that space as well. As you say, it just seems to be throwing every everything over the fence and seeing what people do with it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, this is worrisome in some ways. But I don't again, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I know that real humans work at YouTube, at least for now. So I think that their intentions are probably good. I see you have some tabs about terms of service. What is that all about? Right.

Terms Of Service And Likeness Rights

SPEAKER_03

Okay, so my question at this point is YouTube is now using my likeness, who I am as an individual, to make brand new pieces of content. And I think for a lot of people, this is where I'm talking about this um Rubicon that's crossed this line. I think for a lot of people that that might be completely unacceptable. I made content on this platform to represent myself, my values, my message. And now all of a sudden, anybody else on this platform can change my values, my message, and so on and so forth. And it made me think, well, this is this is, I feel, quite a significant change or update in I think as you put it earlier, Travis, YouTube. It's no longer YouTube, it's we tube or something along those lines. We AI tube. And so it started to make me think well, uh there are some people who've been on this platform for 20 years, right? And they agreed to the terms of service that were presented to them there and then. Now I guess, you know, in all many things that you sign up to, whether it's a a TV service or like buying a video game, putting a mortgage down on a house, you're signing contracts, you're agreeing to policies at the time and they change. And like, do you ever read up on them? I think what what I will typically know remember, Travis, I don't know if it's the same for you in the US, but when there's a significant change in a policy, like an insurance policy or whatever, you'll be sent an email and you'll be updated about it, right?

SPEAKER_02

If it's well, usually, yeah. Unless they say, yeah, 99% of the time, yes.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. And but sometimes that comes and goes in a spam.

SPEAKER_03

The likelihood is you're not gonna read it, all right? Right, of course. You know, at least you were notified of these changes. And you might say, like, there's some grace period, like this is gonna happen in three months. Yeah. So this is where I get to the terms of a service, right? Uh uh and I look at this one in particular to start with, and I've thankfully highlighted it so I can remember where it was in the terms of service. And it's this license to other users. You also grant each other user of a service, a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty fleet free license to access your content through the service, and to use that content, including to reproduce, distribute, modify, display, and perform it only as enabled by a feature of a service. So in I think that I basically say is you can use this new tool, Gemini Omni, to reimagine somebody somebody's likeness. Right? I mean, uh it doesn't go into that much detail, but it's basically saying if your content is on the platform, somebody can use a feature to do something with your content.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah? Only as it's enabled by the feature of the service. In other words, if you can opt out of it, they can't do it. But they're like you've shown earlier, you can't opt out of some of this.

SPEAKER_03

And you know, people can't just download your content from YouTube, like stick it through uh a different AI generator or like edit it on their own uh editor and then re-upload it to YouTube because now then you no longer use any YouTube feature. But now YouTube is enabling us through this reimagine tool to do just that. And I guess maybe I just highlight this word modify. Like modify now in 2026 means something completely different to what it meant in 2025 because of this new feature, in my opinion. Or do you disagree with that?

SPEAKER_02

Modify is a legal word, and all this is very illegal ease. I feel like we can look at it logically and think one thing, but then you get into a court of law, it's like, oh, it doesn't mean that at all. I don't even know. Well, I've lost that argument. I don't know. I gotta be honest I mean, I've I've talked to enough lawyers on this podcast and know I don't know what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_03

If you let's just let's just say though that this I I don't know if this term of service, the wording of this term of service, has changed at all in the last 10 years.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's the thing. It's hard to know, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Let's just say it hasn't, right? The rules of creative engagement have now completely changed because of these new tools that have been added, right?

SPEAKER_02

Yep.

SPEAKER_03

This is where we get back to the idea of you signed up to a term of service and it's maybe changed, but you don't know about it. About this agreement, this is way further down the terms of service. If we materially change this agreement, we'll provide you with reasonable advance notice and the opportunity to review the changes. Except number one, when we launch a new product or feature. So I am not a legal expert, neither are you, Travis, but my simple brain interprets this as if we add a new feature that suddenly allows creators to use your likeness in whatever way they want, we don't need to tell you about it. Because it's a new feature.

SPEAKER_02

And I love I love what your remedy is. If you don't agree to the new terms, you should remove any content you upload and stop using the service. Yeah. Just quit YouTube. Yeah, just buy. Goodbye. Just delete everything. You're exactly right. The way I read that is um that for the most part, we're gonna tell you when things change, except when we have a new exciting feature that we don't want you to like we we don't care what you think because we're gonna push it out anyway. It's our platform. And that's but again, you're not paying to use this platform. So there's this thing of like, it is their platform. And for those that are monetized, you actually get paid to upload, which is cool. Uh, so they can change whatever they want to. It's like, it's like having a house and inviting people to come in and start a business there, and then saying, Well, you know, that living room that you had your business, and I'm actually changing the living room so that it's now more of a kitchen. And I know that your business relies on it being more of a living room than a kitchen, but it is my house. And I understand you're doing business here, but it is my house. And um, and that's kind of where we are. We are in YouTube's house. They may change the furniture around anytime they want to. We don't have a lot of say on that. We can push back, and sometimes they'll listen to us. Uh, they'll listen to viewers more than listen to us, to be perfectly clear. Um, so hopefully when we see things that as creators we we have concerns about, hopefully viewers have the same concerns so they can push back, and then that changes. One thing Google will do is they will stop doing something that does not work. If you look at all the feed, there's like a website out there, I forget what it's called. It's like the Google uh uh graveyard or something where like all the different programs and things that they've ever canceled. And you look at like even features on YouTube, like we can talk about a couple. One of my favorite features they got rid of was YouTube stories. I loved YouTube stories. That thing existed for a couple of years and is gone. What about video replies? You don't got those anymore. There's so many things that they've had and gotten rid of. So this does not necessarily mean all the things we're talking about are a forever thing, but I think the thing that's keeping them up, quote, AI, uh, is not really going away. So it would be harder for some of these things to go away. But it is this. I love that we actually pulled up something, a document that Legal Ease says, we don't have to tell you that we're gonna do this.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Well what line would YouTube have to cross for you to suddenly jump out of your shoes and think, oh my goodness, I agree to this. Like, imagine if YouTube released a tool whereby any user could just delete somebody

Monetisation Power And Creator Leverage

SPEAKER_03

else's video because they don't like it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that would be problematic.

SPEAKER_03

That actually kind of it's a ridiculous, that is a ridiculous idea, but this terms of service says that YouTube could theoretically build such a tool.

SPEAKER_02

In fairness, it kind of exists with a copyright tool. I don't know if I told you this. Yeah, yeah, copyright strike. That's that's so let me let me tell you about this. This actually happened to me. So I have a I don't really do much with it anymore, but I have a face channel that sometimes I do stuff with. And um, one of the videos I did was about a uh an episode of a TV show that had not been shown on TV because it was kind of wasn't banned, but the the person that was on the TV show sued the television company to try to keep that show from airing because it made them look bad. And anytime anyone says anything bad about them, they sue them or whatever. Uh, I did a video about this and showed some of the footage from the show, and they copyright struck my channel, which is crazy, which brought the video down. I don't think they actually even own that footage. But if you look about, if you look about this company, they are very litigious and will take people straight up to court. So, my my only thing I can do is to fight the copyright claiming copyright strike and go, no, I don't, A, it was very much fair use. 100% is fair use because I wasn't using entire the entire episode of it just did little clips, fair use clips and everything. 100% I would probably win that in court. However, this company probably will take me to court. I do not have money to go to court, which means I just have to let the strike lie, even though I'm in the right. So this kind of already exists, and they haven't, you know, done anything about that. So could there be a new feature where someone goes, hey, you did an AI model of me and I don't like it. Goodbye.

SPEAKER_03

I would say this is one of the most recent examples of it. I've not seen anybody else talking about this. Maybe it's just of interest to me. Um, and so that you know, this is why we're talking about here. It does make you think about potentially what else are in the terms of service that you don't know about that may think may make you think twice about making content on YouTube. I think the most famous one, Travis, is this, which is right to monetize. And this has been established for quite a while, and it says you grant to YouTube the right to monetize your content on the service, and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within content or charging users a fee for access. This agreement does not entitle you to any payments. A lot of creators have complained about YouTube running ads on their channel when they aren't yet monetized, thinking that they have a right to earn revenue whenever there's ads on there. Yeah, and there's this there's been this recent episode where channels have been demonetized for inauthentic content, and then ads are still running on their content. I don't know how true that is, I've not seen that my myself, but a lot of there's been enough people saying that that's happening for it to be a pattern that's probably likely. So that's two parts of the terms of service, which I think creators are maybe not aware of that they sign up to. And it makes you wonder what else is in there. Maybe we should have like a we should do like a special live stream where we just read through the entire terms of service and think, well, does this mean that for that particular thing? I'm sure it would be fascinating.

SPEAKER_02

I'm sure all 12 people would enjoy it. I but the thing is it impacts everybody. Now, by the way, I'm actually gonna defend them. And this is gonna sound weird. I'm gonna defend YouTube on this one because they are paying for the servers and the storage and everything that that put your videos up. So of course they have to make money, even on videos that aren't monetized, because if someone views it, it's still costing them money. So I don't have a problem with this specifically. I totally get it. Um, I I do like that when I say like, I mean in like an ironic way that it says this agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Um, just the way they say it is very like, you know what? If we want to pay you, we will. If we don't, we won't. Um, you know, take it or leave it. And what are you gonna do? You either take it or leave it, really, is all there is to it. Um it's so crazy.

SPEAKER_03

Another theoretical uh moment here. Imagine if YouTube decided to just say, we're we're ending the YouTube partner program, folks. We're flicking the switch, you're not getting paid anything, uh, we're gonna take all the money. Now, obviously, everybody's gonna leave a platform, um, but is everybody gonna remember to delete all of our videos and take all of their content off? And uh this is a stupid hypothetical situation, but the wording there just means that all of the control is with YouTube over these these um aspects of of your content. So like this makes you think about how much control do you have over your content and how much you should care about it when there are these terms of service right there that hardly anybody reads.

SPEAKER_02

I've said this for years and I still believe it to this day. If YouTube could get rid of content creators and have good content, they would do that because it'd be cheaper for them. Um although I'm unsure if at this point right now AI is cheaper to make content for like long form than it would be if it was short form. Like that part I'm unsure about. Um so in other words, like if instead of paying creators for their content, would it be cheaper? It's maybe in the future it will be, for them to AI generate content on YouTube than to pay a creator. Right now, I I'm unsure if that's the case. It might be for like a short video, maybe. For long form, uh, I'm I'm not sure. But in the future, it probably will be. And at that point, there will be like this moment of does YouTube even bother, like from a perspective of making more money, like they could just stop paying creators, like you said, and say, hey, well, you know, get sponsorships if you want, but we're gonna have AI content everywhere. That's a scary thought. I hope that's not where we're going. And I hope that um while as a as a company, YouTube needs to continue to innovate and try to be on the cutting edge of certain things. I believe that there's a thing that needs to always be remembered, which is it's you tube, which means human tube, in my estimation. What are we looking at here, Rob?

Third Party Training And Privacy Reality

SPEAKER_03

Interesting question, uh Travis, which is why I bring up this setting. Third party training. Allow third-party companies to train AI models using my channel's content. Again, my uh simplicit Blane translates this as we will we, if you tick this, we can sell your um video data to Meta and OpenAI to train their models for video generation. Right, okay. Now obviously that's unticked, but just think about the wording here, allow third-party companies. It doesn't say anything about Google themselves, so you would imagine that all everything you upload to YouTube is content and data that they can use to train their models. Thankfully, this is a uh channel-wide setting, so you can untick this. But again, you I don't strictly know if this has been used. All of the two and a half thousand videos on our channel uh have been used at some point to train VR3 or like any of any other Google's uh products and features around this.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you know what's interesting about this? I'm literally about to do a video about this on my personal channel, but um so that that you're your the implication here is that allow third parties to do this. Yes, no. We're gonna do it anyway. By the way, like we're doing it.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, we just want to make more money off selling your stuff to somebody else. That's true. Allegedly, speculation, it's just where my mind goes as I read these.

SPEAKER_02

We already know through leaks and stuff that like open AI and stuff, they they did that. They went to YouTube, just they just ripped YouTube videos to train their models. Um uh Apple has this thing they just announced, the new Siri AI, that won't come to Europe right away because Europe wants to allow third-party AI agents on your phone to have total access to your phone. So Apple doesn't want that to happen. Apple has Siri and it could do a lot of the things on your phone. But what the contention is, is the EU says if you want to have Siri AI come to the EU, that's fine. But only if you allow third-party AI agents to have complete access to your phone, which Apple's like, no, that's too much. We don't even want Siri to do that. And that's why it's not coming. So that's where we are in like the general tech space. Uh your phone having access to everything. And now, you know, your likeness if you're uploading to YouTube, just know that if you're online, A, for sure, your your information's out there. It's been leaked in the dark web. It's just, I'm sorry, there's no way about it. If you've been on the internet once, all your stuff is out there, your passwords, everything are out there. There is no assumption of privacy. You cannot expect privacy anymore. And you can't, and this is not like I don't want to say like um, it's not conspiracy. Like, this is just these are just statements of fact. Um, and you I think you when you upload on a platform that you don't own and that you don't pay for, your expectations of what they can do with that content, you need to be wide open and just understand that pretty much it's all on the table. You have to be okay with that. And if you're not okay with it, as they say in their own terms of service, you can delete your content and don't use it.

SPEAKER_03

You know, the I think in the gaming world and the video world, Travis, I think certainly in the last five to ten years, there's there's been this concern over ownership whereby uh you don't necessarily own anything anymore. You know, if you can buy uh if you bought a physical game that was never connected to the internet, then you know, theoretically you could play it for as long as uh the machine worked, the the the console. But now you you might buy a game and in five years' time, because it ha you have to be connected to the internet to play it, even if it's not a multiplayer game, the servers might get turned off. And then you no longer have a game but you you can play anymore, even though you you you you know quote unquote owned it. You know, well I think it's always been the case that you bought the license to to use it for personal use type of thing, like renting movies is the same thing. There was that concern I think recently where if you edited anything in was it Cap Cut? Oh they technically owned whatever you did in there, so like you'd edit something using their editor, and then they could use it for any purpose, they could use it for advertising and and such. So I don't want to describe it as a wild west. It this is just what's now happening with the aggregation and distribution of content. It it uh it's now under this umbrella of the people who are able to distribute it, and we have to make a decision whether we want to allow that or not.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, we've seen so we've seen stuff like this before. Um uh back in the I'll do a WWE thing, back when uh Scott Hall and Kevin Nash left WWE and they went to WCW, they did the old Razor Ramon and Diesel because WWE owned it. Um I'll I'll even I'll even I'll put a more finer point on it. Um, Dr. Savage was technically created during Vid IQ time. I think VidIQ actually owns Dr. Savage. So if I left, I couldn't take him with me unless they gave me the ability to do so. I don't think that that would be a problem. But like technically, I think Vid IQ may own Dr. Savage. So I feel like um this stuff has existed, but now we're starting to see it uh creep into uh to the everyday uh of everything we go through. And by the way, another thing that's happening right now is um the PC computing space is really um in a weird place where the people who manufacture GPUs and stuff are visualizing a future where you don't own a PC, period. And for some people, that's like, oh, that's interesting. You know, how what's the answer? And it'd be cloud computing, which then again makes you a subscription-based uh piece of hardware. Like you don't own anything anymore. This is a whole other subject for a completely different podcast, but you can see how even in YouTube we're seeing some of that uh come to be. We'd love to hear what y'all think about this. You should leave us some comments below. If you're listening to the audio only podcast, you know, listen, you can send us a message. There's a link there to send us a text message. But I would love to understand and think and hear what the content creators are listening to this think about this very important subject. All that to say, YouTube's always going to be evolving, it's always gonna be changing. This is not a bad thing. Don't don't think that, like, oh, it's all over, it's only gonna be AI, it's all crap. YouTube is still here, and people really love genuine connections and genuine videos. Uh, what do you got here, Rob?

Practical Steps And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_03

I I guess it was just the the TLDR because we've we've we've kind of skit around topics and such. The TLDR is there is a new feature that now allows YouTube to take uh your likeness and change it in ways that uh you couldn't imagine. And the way to protect yourself from this, if you have concerns about it, is through shorts remixing in the video details of your content.

SPEAKER_02

Indeed.

SPEAKER_03

And you just my 30-second short of like what you want to pay attention to here.

SPEAKER_02

This is the part that'll probably end up in the intro of uh this particular podcast episode. Uh, if you enjoyed this, let us know in the comments below. I know you want Rob Rob Wilson back. And I think we're gonna see Rob and Dan come back through a little bit more frequently, hopefully, in the next coming weeks and months to come. So we'll do more uh update episodes like this. If you like this, feel free to hit that subscribe button. And I got another video for you right here. You should watch it because it's just as good as this one. See y'all in the next one.