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

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.