YouTube Can Now Use AI to Remove Copyrighted Music From Videos

YouTube quietly celebrated Independence Day this week by previewing a new feature that uses AI to help creators declare independence from copyright strikes.

One of the most annoying parts of streaming or making YouTube videos for a living is when copyrighted music accidentally makes its way into your videos. If you don’t catch it early, you could be out on all of the money that video earns, and could get in trouble with YouTube itself.

Sometimes, this catches piracy. Often, it catches people who stumble across a licensed song in a video game or in the background of their vlog. For live video, not muting quickly enough could demonetize the stream’s archive, while creators making edited video might have to spend hours painstakingly isolating a song from the rest of their work.

YouTube’s had an “Erase Song” tool in beta for a while now, but the company wasn’t proud of its efficacy. Now, it’s updating the feature with a new AI algorithm that will scan a video for copyrighted music and give creators two options.

Erase Song will use AI to attempt to intelligently mute just the offending music while leaving the rest of your audio intact, while Mute all sound will work as a fallback to mute a video for the duration of a copyright protected song.

While YouTube is promising better performance with the updated tool, a company support page says it “might not work if the song is too hard to remove,” hence the need for a fallback.

Unfortunately, Erase Song is only available once a video has been copyright claimed, which means it can’t be used proactively. To access it, go to your copyright claim summary page and click on Select Action in the lower right corner of the screen. Click on Erase Song, then choose Erase Song (yes, again) to use AI to intelligently remove just the claimed audio. Alternatively, click on Mute all sound in the claimed segments if you’re not confident in what the AI can do. You can preview your edited video before finalizing your claim, and if you’re muting all sound in a claimed segment, you can either use suggested timestamps or customize your own.

The YouTube support page says that “if all claimed audio can be muted, the Content ID claim will be removed from your video,” meaning creators can use this system to avoid having to argue with a representative.

Erase Song joins other similar tools like Replace Song, which allows creators to replace a copyright claimed song with royalty free music, and Trim Out Segment, which just removes the copyright claimed part of a video in its entirety.