YouTube Music has added a new generative AI-powered playlist art creator for further personalized playlist customization. Here’s how the feature works.
YouTube is well on its way to turning YouTube Music into a more TikTok-like music discovery experience. But on top of that, it’s embracing generative AI art creation for personalized playlists—now featuring AI-generated artwork. This experimental feature is only available for the YouTube Music app in the United States for now.
“The guided experiences allows users to effortlessly explore from a range of visual themes and options to create a one-of-a-kind cover art that expresses the uniqueness of your personal playlists,” YouTube teases in the blog post announcing the feature. The feature has a few guard rails in place to ensure it can’t be misused.
After creating a playlist and choosing to generate art based on a theme, the app then prompts the user to choose other customizations. In the example provided, a playlist called ‘Good Boy Party Mix’ is created. Tapping on the playlist art now loads into an interface where a theme can be chosen. Available themes include colors, travel, nature, moods, cycles, animals, landscape, fantasy, food & drinks, and more.
Tapping a category like ‘Animals’ will load a cover art generator with four options and a text prompt at the bottom of the screen. These prompts will be familiar to anyone who has played with an AI image generator like DALL-E or Midjourney. ‘Pug’ in the style of ‘a pop art painting’ is the example Google provides, before switching up the prompt to be ‘pug’ in the style of ‘a gothic painting.’ What’s important here are the guardrails in place.
YouTubeMusic can suggest subjects (pug) and concepts (gothic painting), but there is no way to suggest a creation of a copyrighted concept. For example, ‘pug’ in the style of a ‘Shel Silverstein’ drawing isn’t achievable within the YouTube Music framework. That’s important because it’s generating ‘generic’ art that isn’t going to land YouTube in hot water for mimicking an art style—or generate images that re-create the Getty Images watermark.
