From 14 October 2026, YouTube Music has started showing an AI label on songs where generative AI played a significant role in their creation, for example where the composition or the singer’s voice was generated by AI.
Where does the label appear?
The label is shown on the song’s playback screen. Tapping it opens a short explanation of AI’s role in that song. YouTube says the label will also come to the main YouTube app later, but has not announced a date.
How are songs identified?
YouTube combines two approaches: disclosures from publishers and music partners, and YouTube’s own detection tools. According to media reports, ordinary production tools such as pitch correction do not count as generative AI and do not get a label. Labelled songs can still earn money.
The volume of AI-made content, from music to images and video, grows every day, and it is getting harder to tell apart from human work. Labelling gives the audience a choice: to know what they are listening to or watching. Other platforms are expected to move the same way.
To learn about the AI tools themselves and how they differ, read Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and Codex compared.
Photo: Vu Hoang, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped.
Source: YouTube Official Blog ↗
