YouTube has recently released a revolutionary feature which is based on artificial intelligence that will attempt to automatically summarise comments on videos in order to help creators and viewers deal with large amounts of comments. The feature, named “Comment Insights,” is now live for any video that has received more than 100 comments.

All comments about a video are scanned by the AI system and the program produces a brief overview of the topics, attitudes, and questions being raised. This summary is located at the top of the comment section and means that users do not have to scroll through hundreds or thousands of comments to understand the conversation at hand.

For the creators themselves Comment Insights is a useful feature that will help to analyze the reactions of the audience and find out what issues they may face. The feature filters comments according to topics like ‘praise,’ ‘complaint,’ ‘question,’ and ‘suggestion’ so that creators can understand the overall sentiment and areas that need to be addressed.

Audiences are able to get a gist of what the community thinks about a video without directly engaging the comment section. This is especially helpful for videos that are long or are on topics that I am not fully familiar with; the comments contain useful extra information or discussion.

The AI system that powers Comment Insights has been designed to learn from millions of YouTube comments, the context, and the nature of comments. YouTube explains that the system can recognize sarcasm, spam, and comments that are not related to the video to guarantee that the summaries are relevant and correct.

Privacy issues have been dealt with by avoiding the ability to trace summarized content back to the users. The summaries are derived from data in large groups and do not reveal individual characteristics of any individual.

YouTube has also put in place measures that would ensure that the system does not reinforce the content with a negative message. Posts which have been marked as abusive or violating the community guidelines will not be included in the summarization process.

Many content creators have taken the feature positively since they think it will help them to save a lot of time while managing their communities. Tech vlogger Marques Brownlee said: ‘This is a game changer for creators with an active comments section’. In a way, it is similar to having your very own assistant going through feedback.

However, some creators have voiced their concerns on the fact that important individual contribution might be overshadowed during summarization. In response to this, YouTube has pointed out that the feature is designed to work hand in hand with the complete comment section.

Comment Insights is at the moment only available in English but will be translated to other languages in the upcoming months. YouTube is also looking for a way to incorporate the feature into its current analytics offering to offer creators more data about their viewers.

AI-summarized comments are now going to be an addition to YouTube’s measures to clean up its comment section. The company has been using AI and machine learning to address problems like spam, harassment and misinformation in comments.

This new feature also points to a new trend of social networks utilizing AI to guide users through a large number of posts and interactions. They may be a necessity in the future as the nature of the discussions shift and grow more plentiful and intricate.

Although the ideas presented in the current paper are still in their infancy, preliminary feedback implies that Comment Insights may revolutionalise the way users engage with the comment sections of YouTube. The feature is still growing and developing, but in its current state, it could become the new norm for comment management in social media.

In the meantime, YouTube has claimed that it will be paying close attention to how Comment Insights works and how useful it is, and it will be adjusting and adding to this feature based on how people respond to it. In light of the growing influence of AI in the sphere of online interactions, this represents a further evolution in the ways in which social media can be engaged with.