YouTube AI label: player if photoreal, description if animated

Short answer

On YouTube, a video that is realistic and meaningfully altered or generated with AI gets a label in the video player, while non-photorealistic or animated content gets its label in the expanded description under "How this content was made". Both come from YouTube's help page on disclosing GenAI content (read 2026-10-09). The practical question for an AI video maker is which of your clips counts as realistic, and YouTube's page gives four concrete cases that require disclosure.

What YouTube asks creators to disclose

The page lists content that makes a real person appear to say or do something they did not do, altered footage of a real event or place, a generated realistic scene that did not occur, and AI-created music as the main focus of a video. It says fantastical depictions such as unicorns or animated scenarios do not require disclosure, and neither do primarily aesthetic edits.

Sorting Sume clips

Sume's video generation models are prompt-driven: the same model can return a documentary-looking street scene or a flat illustrated one, and the docs do not tag outputs as realistic or not. You make the call per clip. A photoreal Seedance or Wan clip of an invented kitchen is a generated realistic scene. A flat-color animation of a mascot is not.

• Photoreal product or lifestyle b-roll that never happened: toggle the disclosure on in YouTube Studio.
• Clearly illustrated explainer or mascot clip: not required; the label can still appear in the description.
• Anything with a real person's face or voice doing something they did not do: disclose.
• A trimmed, captioned or cropped clip of footage you shot: these are edits, not generation.

What happens if you skip it

YouTube says it can apply a label itself for content made with its GenAI tools, content carrying C2PA metadata, or content its systems detect, and that a label it adds in the undisclosed case cannot be removed by the creator. Creators who "consistently choose not to disclose" can face manual labels, removal of content or suspension from the YouTube Partner Program.

The cost of getting this right is a single toggle per upload. The cost of getting it wrong is a label you do not control. Keep the job id and model id of each generated clip so you can answer the question later; the jobs and results page in the docs covers where a finished job's result is read.