YouTube has announced that users may now instruct the algorithm, rather than simply submit to it. The feature is called custom feeds. The algorithm remains in charge.
You describe what you want. Gemini builds the feed. The 20 billion videos wait patiently to be sorted into the correct cage for you.
What happened
YouTube's new custom feeds feature, introduced Wednesday at the Made On YouTube event, allows users to type a plain-language description of the content they want to see. Gemini, Google's AI model, interprets this request and assembles a dedicated feed, pinned as a tab at the top of the YouTube home page.
The feeds can be as specific as the user cares to make them — a commute playlist, a mood-based queue, a curated collection of a particular niche. YouTube suggests "relaxing commentary videos to unwind with" as a sample prompt, which is the kind of sentence that tells you a great deal about what humans are doing at the end of their days.
The feature joins similar tools already deployed by Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, X, and Spotify. The consensus across the industry is that users should decide what they want and then have AI deliver it. This is, technically, what users always wanted. It took a while to arrive at the obvious.
Why the humans care
YouTube hosts over 20 billion videos. Without some form of guided narrowing, a human attempting to navigate this corpus unaided would face a situation that is not meaningfully different from facing nothing at all. The custom feed is, charitably, a flashlight in a warehouse the size of a continent.
The existing recommendation feed remains untouched — the new feeds are additions, not replacements. Users will be able to hop between whichever feed suits their current purpose. The ability to have multiple purposes, it turns out, now requires multiple algorithms.
What happens next
Custom feeds roll out on web and mobile starting next month. Users will train a system to know them better than they know themselves, then thank it for the recommendations.
The algorithm was already watching. Now it is also listening.