YouTube launches AI-Generated Quizzes [Bobby Owsinski]

To better tailor content to users, Youtube has launched AI-generated quizzes. To Bobby Owsinski, it feels like Google just gave him a very tedious homework assignment.

by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

YouTube announced that you might be seeing AI-generated quizzes after watching a video soon. The experimental feature in its mobile app is designed to help its users find out more about topics of interest presented in their videos, as well as help YouTube better measure how much a viewer understands the content in a video.

Here’s how YouTube explains it. “If you’re a viewer in the experiment, you may see AI-generated quizzes start to pop up on your app homepage. The quizzes will test your understanding of a subject covered in a video you recently watched. If you choose to take a quiz, a link to the recently watched video will appear under it so you can easily navigate back to learn more about the topic at hand.”

Am I Back In School?

I don’t know about you, but this sounds a lot like homework to me, and tedious as well. The last thing I want to think about is what I learned from a video, especially if I’m trying to find an answer to a computer problem that needs to get fixed right away. There’s also an argument to be made that with so much information of all types literally at one’s fingertips, it’s not as important to retain of lot of information anymore, especially if it’s for a one-time use.

It could work for online learning, however, but most instructors that I know would prefer to construct their own quizzes. I know that every time I’ve asked an AI to come up with test questions it usually missed the point in a most boring way.

That said, the quizzes feature is only an experiment that’s being rolled out to a limited number of YouTube users, so it might never be officially released, or it could be released with many changes down the line.

Again, this is a beta program that only a few users will have access to, and it’s only available on mobile for both iOS and Android. No word on which countries will be participating in the experiment.

Bobby Owsinski is a producer/engineer, author, blogger, podcaster, and coach. He has authored 24 books on recording, music, the music business and social media.