- Spotter's new AI studio scans a creator's YouTube library to give them video ideas.
- The feature factors in previous video performance to help generate ideas that may drive more views.
- Spotter's product lead says creators need more efficiency tools to compete as AI content spreads.
Spotter has been giving creators money for years as part of its catalog investment business. Now, it wants to offer them video ideas, too.
The company announced on Tuesday that it's launching a creative studio for YouTubers that uses generative AI to help them brainstorm video ideas, titles, concept art, and even different parts of a video's storyline.
The feature trains on a creator's catalog in order to generate video ideas that match their style and tone, analyzing previous titles to imitate their typical structure. The company said it transcribes the audio of each video into log lines so its AI tool can understand how a creator's stories work so that it can pitch new ideas they might consider making. It does not analyze the visuals of a video, meaning it wouldn't pick up on non-audio elements. It looks at the performance of previous videos to identify top performers, what it describes as outliers, and recommend ideas that would do similarly well. It also scans the broader YouTube ecosystem for inspiration, mostly looking at video titles from related videos to come up with ideas.
Spotter said it's been testing the feature in a beta program with creators like MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson), Dude Perfect, and Colin and Samir. The tool costs $49 a month and is available to YouTubers in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada.
Of course, the question remains: Do creators really need artificial intelligence to help them come up with video ideas? Are creators feeling that uninspired?
Paul Bakaus, Spotter's EVP of product and creator tools, thinks the company's studio feature will arm creators with an important tool to help them compete with a surge of AI content coming to YouTube and other platforms.
"It's very much about helping creators come out on top in the wave of infinite AI content that's coming," Bakaus said. "There's going to be so much generated AI video, both voice [and] audio, ideas, storylines, everything, that for humans to actually still come out on top will be infinitely more challenging. And so ironically, we are building software that uses AI to have creators come out on top of that wave."
Training AI models on YouTube content has become a touchy subject in recent months. Some of the biggest AI players, such as OpenAI and Meta, have come under scrutiny for transcribing YouTube videos en masse to generate training data. Spotter declined to share which base models its AI tool was built on, telling BI that it uses a series of commercial LLMs and diffusion models for various tasks. The company said it transcribes videos of its studio clients to recommend ideas to them individually, but not those of other creators on YouTube. It's taken measures to help ensure its content recommendations are unique and personalized to an individual creator, but it's still a creator's responsibility at the end of the day to make sure that their final videos are original, a spokesperson said, noting that the feature is meant to serve as a copilot for YouTubers.
The company said it has layers of content moderation for both its language and image generations to avoid producing content that pushes racial stereotypes, nudity, and other things it wouldn't want to show up in its studio.
Outside of its creator studio, Spotter runs a business where it offers creators cash in exchange for the licensing rights to their content. The company said it's paid out $940 million to creators. Several of Spotter's beta testers for its studio product, including MrBeast and Dude Perfect, have made capital deals with the company. Spotter also works with brands on advertising opportunities across its creator network.
This story has been updated with new details.