YouTube Music now lets you make your own playlist art with AI – The Verge

YouTube Music is finally letting you change the cover art of your playlists. While you still won’t get to upload your own image, you can now make a custom image using generative AI.

As shown in the below GIF, you can create AI-generated art by tapping the pen icon in the bottom right corner of your playlist’s cover art. You can then select the category that you want your image to fall into, like animals, food and drink, colors, nature, or travel.

From there, you can either hit “randomize” or choose from several prompts, such as creating a pug “in the style of a Medieval Gothic painting.” The AI will output five different images for you to choose from. Once you hit “save,” that art will become the image representing your playlist.

The feature is only rolling out for English language users in the US for now, but YouTube says to “stay tuned for expansion to other regions and languages globally.” Previously, YouTube automatically created an image by merging the art for the first four songs in your playlist into a grid-like format. This should at least help you capture the feel of your playlist even if you can’t use your own images.

Additionally, YouTube announced several other features coming to its music streaming service. That includes a new “speed dial” feature, which plants your most listened-to content on your homepage, allowing you to quickly hop into your favorite tunes. YouTube says this feature will arrive in the “coming months.”

YouTube Music made quite a few changes to its app over the past several months. After rolling out the ability to create custom radio stations earlier this year, YouTube Music introduced a TikTok-like Samples feature that lets you discover new music by listening to snippets of songs. It also added a comments section to its songs as it aims to compete with Spotify, which just saw an increase in monthly active users.