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Sometimes, you don’t read the names of your playlists on YouTube Music. Rather, you just look at the cover art. The app crafts the cover image based on the album art of the songs in it. It’s a neat idea, but the company wants you to make your own. According to a report, YouTube Music will let you generate new playlist cover art using AI.
This is most likely making use of Google’s Imagen image model. This is Google’s image model and it’s been in production for quite some time. It’s what will power the image generation behind Google’s Gemini multimodal LLM. We’ve seen examples of what it can do here and there, but this will give you a more direct showcase of what Imagen can do.
YouTube Music will let you use AI to craft new playlist art
This feature is currently rolling out, but we’ve yet to see it. If you don’t see it just yet, then you’ll want to wait a day or two.
In order to use this feature, you’ll go to the playlist that you want to generate art for. There, you’ll tap on the Edit Playlist button. In the edit menu, you’ll see a picture of the playlist art. Tapping on that will open a UI that will let you choose a category. These categories will be pretty general like animals or nature. When you choose a category, the app will then generate an image based on it.
From the way it sounds, it doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to type in a prompt. If not, then that will be a bummer. That would give people more flexibility. If you have a taste for music that is not properly represented by general categories, then it would be hard to find art for it. In any case, this is a nice feature to have if you want to switch things up.