Scrolling through YouTube Shorts may soon feel… familiar. Almost too familiar. In his annual letter to the creator community, Neal Mohan announced that creators will soon be able to generate Shorts using their own AI likeness, including their face and voice.
“This year you’ll be able to create a Short using your own likeness, produce games with a simple text prompt, and experiment with music,” Mohan wrote.
“Throughout this evolution, AI will remain a tool for expression, not a replacement.”
It’s the latest (and most provocative) step in YouTube’s growing AI roadmap, and a signal that the platform is doubling down on scale, speed, and creator efficiency.
Shorts is already a behemoth. According to Mohan, the format now averages 200 billion daily views, making it one of the most powerful distribution engines on the internet.
The new AI-likeness feature will sit alongside YouTube’s existing AI tools for Shorts, including:
- AI-generated clips
- AI stickers
- Auto-dubbing
- Music experimentation
The promise is obvious: creators can produce more content, faster, without being on camera every time. The risk is just as clear: feeds filled with near-identical, semi-automated versions of the same people.
YouTube hasn’t yet shared what level of realism or control creators will have, but the direction is unmistakable, creators become systems, not just individuals.
Unsurprisingly, likeness brings risk.
To pre-empt abuse, YouTube says it will also expand tools that allow creators to manage how their likeness is used in AI-generated content. This builds on the platform’s likeness-detection technology launched last October, which helps eligible creators identify AI content that mimics their face or voice and request its removal.
In other words: You can clone yourself but others can’t (at least, not legally or easily)
It’s YouTube trying to draw a line between empowerment and exploitation, a line that’s getting harder to see as AI tools become more accessible.
The AI Slop Problem
Mohan also directly addressed the elephant in the feed: AI slop.
Low-effort, repetitive, click-optimized content has already flooded Shorts, Reels, and TikTok, and AI only accelerates that trend. YouTube claims it’s actively upgrading its spam and quality-ranking systems to reduce the spread of low-quality AI content.
“With this openness comes a responsibility to maintain the high quality viewing experience that people want.”
That’s the tension at the heart of this move: AI helps creators scale, but it also threatens the signal-to-noise ratio that made Shorts work in the first place.