YouTube gives two big AI movie-trailer channels the boot

Plenty of AI content has found a home on YouTube: fire up a fresh account, and you’ll be seeing gen-AI videos within just a few rounds of recommendations. AI video in general is allowed on YouTube, of course, but some of it does run afoul of YouTube’s policies — and now, two major offenders have been booted from the platform.

Deadline reports that YouTube has banned two large channels that had been peddling AI-generated movie trailers. The problem wasn’t the trailers themselves, but how they were presented: YouTube channels Screen Culture and KH Studio had been uploading a large quantity of AI movie trailers that weren’t clearly labeled, which YouTube says violates the platform’s policies on spam and misleading metadata.

The report says that these two channels were demonetized earlier this year for similar offenses, but that they’d each made their way back into YouTube’s good graces by labeling their AI-generated clips as fan trailers or parodies. More recently, though, their uploads have lacked these qualifiers, a change that’s resulted in their bans.

The channels caught the attention of viewers by creating movie trailers that combined actual footage with AI-generated scenes, often at an overwhelming pace. The report points out that Screen Culture had made 23 different bootleg trailers for Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Screen Culture and KH Studio’s removal won’t completely solve the problem of fake movie trailers on YouTube, but their absence in search results and recommended videos should be noticeable: Deadline says that prior to their bans, together, the two channels’ videos had amassed more than a billion views.