YouTube Axes AI Film Trailer Pages — Are Music Takedowns Next?

Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema

YouTube has reportedly started terminating some of the channels behind unauthorized artificial intelligence film trailers. Is a crackdown on AI music accounts next?

Though it’ll be up to the new year to deliver an answer, we can be sure of two related points at present. First, the video-sharing giant has booted Screen Culture and KH Studio – a pair of prominent fake-trailer specialists, according to Deadline – from the platform altogether.

Per the same outlet, the terminations followed considerable pushback against the channels. And while it probably doesn’t need saying, said pushback was set in motion by the involved uploads’ reach and adjacent ability to confuse fans (or at a minimum distract from proper trailers).

(Screen Culture allegedly pumped out 23 fake trailers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps alone – with a few outranking the actual trailer, itself boasting around 17 million views, in search results.)

Long story short: YouTube had reportedly slapped Screen Culture and KH Studio with a monetization timeout, which ended when they started adding disclaimers like “fan trailer” and “parody” to their upload titles.

But the channels, having reportedly generated a combined one billion or so views, are said to have reverted to their old ways – an alleged move that then drove the takedowns.

Second, we can also state with confidence that there’s a massive amount of AI audio inundating DSPs and, in the process, stealing fans, playlist spots, and royalties from real artists. As most are aware, allegedly infringing machine-made tracks – as well as tracks that make too big a commercial splash – typically face takedowns and/or threats of legal action.

In general, however, it’s a different story for the avalanche of AI songs with comparatively modest stream/view counts. As demonstrated by hard data and cursory DSP searches alike, these creations, while not yet outshining genuine music, are steadily expanding their presence on platforms such as YouTube and Spotify.

Take the mountain of AI covers and the sea of lengthy videos “inspired by” Etta James, B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and many others. It’s (seemingly) safe to say the low-quality content isn’t stealing fans away from the named artists. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it isn’t gaming the algorithm, disrupting recommendations, skewing social media search results, and more.

Now consider that there isn’t any end in sight for the intensifying AI music explosion, which, multitude of “artist” names or not, is attributable in part to a relatively small group of high-volume uploaders.

Against this backdrop, AI-focused music page pulldowns on YouTube and elsewhere don’t appear impossible for 2026 – especially since a concerning number of AI outputs are already hitting DSPs each day.