How AI-made fake movie trailers went viral, and why YouTube finally stepped in

Finally, YouTube is taking action on the AI pandemic that's plaguing the Hollywood industry. Well, it has been involved in pretty much every industry. However, you may have noticed a flux of AI-generated film trailers being uploaded to the video-sharing platform.

But it seems like this flow of fake videos has been disrupted to some extent, as the platform has banned a few of them, according to Deadline. The banned channels in focus here are Screen Culture and KH Studios. Both of them, before getting banned, had collectively garnered a couple of million subscribers and over a billion views.

Now, if you try to visit either of the channels, you are going to find the following message on the screen,

"This page isn’t available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else."

In one of its initiatives, Screen Culture also created 23 trailers of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. A couple more fake trailers include the upcoming series Harry Potter and HBO's Wednesday, which dropped its final episode of season 2 on September 3, 2025.

Even though YouTube has removed these couple of channels, it doesn't mean it is over. Chances are, if you try to look for a film's trailer that hasn't officially been released, you will find an AI-generated one for the film you have searched for.

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YouTube began cracking down on such AI videos earlier this year

AI has made it a lot easier to generate and upload videos on the internet. And given that YouTube is among the most popular video uploading platforms, it has seen a flux of a range of AI-generated videos, not just the ones concerning film trailers.

One thing that made this an issue for authentic creators on YouTube is that these videos were seen as 'original' by the algorithm. Meaning they are eligible to earn money from the content.

Hence, beginning July 15, 2025, the video-sharing platform updated its YouTube Partner Program policy, making it strict for what the netizens have begun calling "AI slop."

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Facebook has been plagued by AI slop lately, too

It's not just YouTube. So many pages on Mark Zuckerberg's platform have been uploading fake AI-generated videos, too.

For example, there's a page called Let's Talk Movies. We navigated its 'Reels' section on the platform, and turns out there's an entire fleet of false videos concerning TV shows and movies.

What this channel does is it includes some movie clips and mixes them with AI-generated clips. For one, there's a reel for 'Captain Britain,' which includes clips from some Henry Cavill films and AI-generated clips of him. The video holds 569K views as of this writing.

Same is the case with another video of 'Avengers: Doomsday,' which didn't even bother to check if it included videos from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like the 'Captain Britain' video, it too had a mix of AI-generated clips and clips from movies like Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011).

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How do you identify a fake AI-generated video?

While many people around the globe are enjoying such videos, the virality of some videos can be seen. However, it isn't a herculean task to tell the difference between a fake and a real video.

One of the things you'll see is a lack of coordination between emotions and expressions. Another thing to notice is that odd things are happening in it, like a dream or a hallucination.

Even the Avengers: Endgame directors, the Russos, say that,

"AI is in its generative state now, where it has, as we call them, hallucinations. You can’t do mission-critical work with something that hallucinates."

It is just a step, but YouTube's initiative to ban these channels gives some hope to the creators trying to deliver authentic content to their subscribers.

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