Making AI-Enhanced Videos: Analyzing Generative AI Use Cases in YouTube Content Creation

2025-03-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of empirical understanding regarding generative AI (GenAI) adoption patterns in YouTube short-video creation. Through qualitative content analysis and thematic coding of 274 creator tutorial videos, we systematically map GenAI usage across the end-to-end video production pipeline—encompassing planning, production, editing, and publishing. We identify 12 high-frequency application scenarios, including topic ideation, script generation, prompt engineering, audiovisual synthesis, super-resolution restoration, and title/caption recommendation. Our core contribution is the first empirically grounded, AI-augmented workflow framework specifically designed for short-video creators. This framework delineates human–AI division of labor and interaction points throughout the creative process, offering both theoretical insights and practical guidance for AI tool design and collaborative practice.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Generation
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Computer Vision: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for Vision

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search

Abstract

Generative AI (GenAI) tools enhance social media video creation by streamlining tasks such as scriptwriting, visual and audio generation, and editing. These tools enable the creation of new content, including text, images, audio, and video, with platforms like ChatGPT and MidJourney becoming increasingly popular among YouTube creators. Despite their growing adoption, knowledge of their specific use cases across the video production process remains limited. This study analyzes 274 YouTube how-to videos to explore GenAI's role in planning, production, editing, and uploading. The findings reveal that YouTubers use GenAI to identify topics, generate scripts, create prompts, and produce visual and audio materials. Additionally, GenAI supports editing tasks like upscaling visuals and reformatting content while also suggesting titles and subtitles. Based on these findings, we discuss future directions for incorporating GenAI to support various video creation tasks.

Problem

• Explores GenAI's role in YouTube video creation process.
• Analyzes use cases of GenAI in planning, production, and editing.
• Identifies GenAI's impact on topic selection and content generation.

Innovation

• Generative AI streamlines video creation tasks
• AI tools generate scripts, visuals, and audio
• AI supports editing, upscaling, and content reformatting