YouTube’s top brains crack making its ads even worse: Using AI to insert commercials at moments you’re ‘most engaged’ with its videos

At the start of this year, after YouTube inexplicably decided that I was not, in fact, a proud resident of Argentina, it shunted me off my alarmingly cheap YouTube Premium package back into its regular, un-premium offering. It’s terribly disruptive, which I imagine is the point: ads before I start a video, during a video, next to video previews, as far as the eye can see. No, I don’t want to use Grammarly, thank you.

So imagine my delight on learning, via The Verge, that YouTube’s top brains have cracked how to make the whole experience even worse for the end user, thanks to the infinite power of Google’s Gemini AI. At this week’s Brandcast event (a big networking and presentation carnival for the platform’s advertisers), YouTube gleefully announced “Peak Points.” That’s its name for a new system that lets Gemini identify the “most meaningful, or ‘peak,’ moments within YouTube’s popular content.”

So far, so acceptable (though I don’t know how that’s markedly different from YouTube’s already-existing “most replayed” feature), but then comes the sucker punch—advertisers can take advantage of Gemini’s Peak Points feature to “place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.

In other words, YouTube is turning AI to the task of identifying “contextually relevant” parts of videos on its platform to cram ads into, ensuring that they’re carefully placed to hit viewers when they’re “most engaged” with the content on their screen. I don’t know about you, but an ad suddenly Kool-Aid Manning through the wall when I’m most engaged with the thing I’m watching feels like a recipe to reach new peaks of frustration. I dunno if that’s really the reaction advertisers want.

But, frankly, I wonder if it’s even about any of that, so much as it’s about giving Google an opportunity to say ‘AI’ on a stage and trigger the Pavlovian response that has the world’s executive class handing over wads and wads of cash. Call me a terribly cynical Luddite (and, hey, the Luddites had a point, thank you), but this feels like another mark in the ledger for AI being a technology that has investors and capitalists incredibly excited, but that offers very little to humble proles like you and me except a worse, more frustrating world.