TL;DRYouTube killed AI slideshows after viewers rejected them and launched Ask YouTube, which keeps creators central to search
YouTube ran an experiment last summer in which AI selected segments from creator videos, stitched them into slideshows, and served them as answers to search queries. The feature launched to US Premium subscribers in June 2025 and expanded in August. Then it quietly vanished.
“People just didn’t like it,” Emily Moxley, YouTube’s vice president of product management, told Semafor. Viewers wanted to hear from the creators themselves, not consume their knowledge stripped of context and personality. The experiment proved that the relationship between viewers and creators is not something AI can easily replace.
YouTube went back to the drawing board and recently launched Ask YouTube, a conversational AI search feature that enhances discovery without pushing creators into the background. The tool was announced at Google I/O in May for Premium subscribers, expanded to US desktop users this month, and is coming to mobile and TV soon.
Under the hood, Ask YouTube breaks a complex question into simpler ones, fans them out across YouTube’s existing search systems, and organises the results. Rather than generating a new video from stitched clips, the feature jumps users straight to the specific moment in a creator’s video that answers their question. The AI writes only the connective text between results.
