YouTube Shorts Challenges TikTok With Music-Making AI for Creators

TikTok's tools for adding music to short videos helped turn short-form video into a phenomenon. Now Google is giving some YouTube Shorts creators an AI feature called Dream Track that can generate songs, including lyrics, melody, and accompaniment, in the styles of seven different artists including Charlie Puth, Demi Lovato, Sia, and T-Pain with a tool called Dream Track. To whip up a 30-second clip with Dream Track a creator just has to enter a prompt, such as "a ballad about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic," then select which artist the song should be styled on. The new AI capabilities might help Google lure users from TikTok, where AI tools for adding visual or audio effects are hugely popular. YouTube says it is looking into how artists whose work helped train its music-generating algorithms will receive a cut of future ad revenue generated by videos featuring AI-generated audio.