YouTube has added new AI features for Shorts

The video hosting platform YouTube has added a new AI feature to its Shorts service for short videos. It allows users to transform images into six-second clips.

the playground is open on Shorts ✨

📷 bring your camera roll to life by transforming photos into videos 🪄 dive into a world of Veo effects and doodle effects 📍 discover our new AI playground, an all in one hub for creation features pic.twitter.com/O6dO9e73XJ

— YouTube (@YouTube) July 23, 2025

The user can select a photo from the gallery and create a video from it. The tool will offer several options to choose from for the uploaded image.

The new feature can be used to bring photos to life, animate landscapes, or group shots, the company noted. As an example, it showed how a static image of a pedestrian traffic light turns into a short video with a dancing character.

Initially, the new tool will be available in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. There are plans to expand the geography further. A similar feature will appear in Google Photos.

New AI effects were also introduced. With their help, users can turn their sketches into artistic images, and selfies into videos, for example, where they swim underwater.

The new toolkit operates on the basis of Veo 2 — a video model from Google. All materials created using AI are marked with SynthID watermarks and special labels indicating that the content was created by artificial intelligence.

Additionally, YouTube has introduced AI Playground — a new space for working with generative AI, ready-made prompts, and tools.

Let us remind you that in April, YouTube launched a new feature using artificial intelligence to create background music and add it to videos.