TikTok Creators Beware: AI-Generated Search Results Could Hurt Your Views

TikTok is adding AI to its search results. What does this mean for creators? Some of you may have noticed that when you search for something on TikTok now, it will create a AI search highlight. So this isn't specifically pointing to a video, but instead pulling from the videos and creating a highlight instead. TikTok is using ChatGPT in order to create these search results. It's still very much in test mode right now, so whether or not this will be adopted is anyone's guess. Here's the interesting thing for TikTok creators, this is very much TikTok leaning into the fact that younger generations are using TikTok like a search engine. Gen Z in people far younger than me are using TikTok as a search engine to find tutorials and information. Previously people obviously went to Google, but TikTok is now competitor in this realm. So adding AI results is aligned with the fact that people use TikTok as a search engine. What this means for creators, though, is that people might not necessarily watch the video. Instead, this AI might be able to look at all the popular videos around a particular topic, pull the information and combine it in order to give an immediate response. So instead of a user having to go through all the videos and actually watch them, they just get the answer they need. In this example here, instead of watching five videos and making a classic vanilla chia seed pudding, I could just grab the information from here and not have to watch anything. So our videos are being used to train that AI, but we're not necessarily going to see the benefits in terms of views and create a fundamental.