YouTube’s new AI chatbot wants to fix your messy home feed – but at what cost?

Open YouTube for a quick video and you’re instantly greeted by a chaotic wall of recommendations: a Marvel clip you watched once, a three–hour podcast you’ll never finish, cooking shorts despite never having boiled an egg on camera. That feed is the direct product of YouTube’s powerful recommendation algorithm, a system that tries to understand you from every view, like, dislike, and subscription. Sometimes it gets frighteningly accurate. Other times, one late–night rabbit hole is enough to turn your home page into a stranger’s account for weeks.

Now YouTube is quietly testing a different approach. Instead of the algorithm guessing what you want, the platform is experimenting with an AI chatbot that lets you tell YouTube, in plain language, what you actually feel like watching. The experiment is called “Your Custom Feed,” and if it rolls out widely, it could fundamentally change how we all interact with the YouTube home page – for better control, but also with fresh questions about how much data we’re handing over in the process.

From surveillance-style guessing to simply asking you

Today, the YouTube home feed is a complex prediction machine. It learns from your watch history, the videos you abandon, the thumbnails you hover over, the channels you follow, and even how often you tap “Not interested.” Watch a couple of Marvel breakdowns and, for days, your home feed can look like Comic-Con exploded on your screen. The algorithm is doing exactly what it was built to do: maximize engagement by serving you more of whatever seemed to work last time.

The problem is that your interests are not static. Maybe you watched a Marvel trailer once because a friend sent it. Maybe you clicked a wrestling clip by accident. Maybe you were bored on a Sunday and fell into a five–video deep hole about camping knives and will never, ever go camping. Yet the algorithm treats those moments like a long–term commitment. Your feed becomes skewed, and cleaning it up requires a tedious ritual of hiding videos, reporting topics, and carefully curating history – work most people will never do.

“Your Custom Feed” is YouTube’s attempt to flip that dynamic. Instead of the system silently guessing, you get to speak up.

How the “Your Custom Feed” AI chatbot works

If you’re part of the current test group, you’ll see a new chip labeled “Your Custom Feed” sitting next to the classic “Home” tab on the YouTube homepage. Tap it, and you’re taken into a special area where an AI-powered chatbot asks what you’d like to see more of. There’s no complex interface, no sliders, no hidden settings menu. You simply type a short sentence like, “I want to see more WWE videos,” or “Show me cozy coding tutorials and fewer prank videos.”

Once you do that, YouTube uses the chatbot’s understanding of your prompt to reshape your home feed. The recommendation system essentially gets a soft reset around your new instructions, and your homepage starts filling with videos that match the themes, creators, and topics you described. It’s a layer of explicit control sitting on top of the usual algorithm – a way to quickly steer your recommendations without starting a brand-new account.

At this stage, the experience is experimental and limited. Not everyone will see the “Your Custom Feed” chip, and even some YouTube Premium users are left out of the test for now, reinforcing that this is a small-scale trial rather than a full rollout. But it does give us a preview of how YouTube imagines the next generation of personalization: conversational, flexible, and driven by AI prompts instead of obscure settings.

But… aren’t these things called “Subscriptions”?

As soon as you hear about an AI chatbot that lets you tell YouTube what you want to watch, a very old-school thought pops up: isn’t that what the Subscriptions tab is for? Many users are already joking that Google has reinvented a problem that had a simple answer: just follow the channels you like and watch from there. Several early reactions can be summed up as, “I think they’re called ‘Subscriptions.’ Well done, Google.”

They’re not entirely wrong. The Subscriptions feed is still the most reliable way to see exactly what your chosen creators upload, without AI trying to interpret your mood. But the reality is that huge numbers of people live almost entirely on the Home feed. They subscribe loosely, sample content from search results and shorts, and rarely manage their subscriptions list. For those viewers, a conversational “Your Custom Feed” could be a shortcut to sanity – a way to say, “Enough Marvel, show me tech reviews and language learning,” without rebuilding their entire relationship with the platform.

The tension here is clear: YouTube is promising more control, but it is delivering it through yet another layer of AI, instead of simply pushing people toward cleaner, simpler tools that already exist.

AI-powered feeds are becoming the new default everywhere

YouTube isn’t alone in this shift. Across the social web, major platforms are racing to put AI between you and your feed. On X (formerly Twitter), owner Elon Musk has been championing Grok, the site’s built-in AI chatbot, as a way to reshape the experience. The plan is that, rather than manually fiddling with lists and filters, you’ll eventually be able to tell Grok what kind of posts you want to see and have your feed adjust dynamically.

Instagram is following a slightly different path. Under Adam Mosseri’s leadership, the platform has been testing options that let users directly train the algorithm by adding or removing topics of interest. Instead of blindly trusting the recommendation engine, you can nudge it: more travel content, fewer prank reels, less crypto hype. Whether it’s done through a chatbot like Grok or a structured topic picker, the direction is the same: platforms are finally admitting that users deserve clearer, easier controls over what floods their screens.

YouTube’s “Your Custom Feed” fits neatly into this larger story. AI is becoming the interface, the thing you talk to in order to negotiate with the algorithm behind the scenes.

The hidden cost: your prompts are training somebody’s AI

There’s another side to this shiny new control. Every time you tell YouTube’s chatbot what you want – “more boxing highlights,” “less political drama,” “tutorials for Python beginners” – you’re revealing something about yourself: your hobbies, your mood, your sensitivities, even your frustrations. That information doesn’t just vanish once your feed updates.

For a company like Google, these prompts are incredibly valuable training data. They can be fed into large language models like Gemini to help those models better understand human intent, preference, and context. The same AI that customizes your YouTube home page today may indirectly become smarter across other Google products tomorrow, powered by what you told it in what felt like a private conversation about videos.

In other words, you’re not just customizing your feed. You’re also quietly helping build the next generation of Google’s AI systems – often without a clear explanation of how long your prompts are stored, how they’re used, or how deeply they’re linked back to your profile.

Not everyone wants AI in their feed at all

For a growing group of viewers, the problem isn’t that the algorithm guesses wrong – it’s that the algorithm is there at all. These users don’t want a chatbot mediating what they see; they want predictable, chronological, human-curated content. They already stick to the Subscriptions tab, manually visit creator pages, or even use third-party tools to escape recommendations altogether.

For them, features like “Your Custom Feed” feel unnecessary at best and invasive at worst. That’s why a truly user-first rollout would need one critical option: an off switch. If YouTube does push this AI chatbot to the wider public, it should also offer a clear way to disable it and avoid having any prompts logged or used for training. Giving people control also means respecting those who don’t want to participate in the AI experiment in the first place.

Until then, expect plenty of sarcastic remarks along the lines of, “We already solved this with subscriptions,” coming from users who find the whole thing overengineered.

YouTube’s long campaign to give you more control

The AI chatbot may be new, but YouTube has been gradually experimenting with ways to let you refine your experience for years. Occasionally, a “Customize your feed” prompt appears on the home page, inviting you to choose the types of videos you enjoy – gaming, education, music, and so on. Those preferences then feed into the recommendation engine, giving it a more structured understanding of your tastes.

On top of that, YouTube constantly asks for micro–feedback: “Do you like this video?” “Not interested?” “Don’t recommend this channel?” Those small choices are tiny steering inputs that help the system correct course. They are powerful, but scattered and reactive – you’re always responding to what the algorithm already decided to show you, instead of proactively setting the direction.

At one point, YouTube Premium subscribers even gained a quirky experimental feature that allowed them to color–tune their feed, picking a visual theme that shifted the look and feel of the homepage. It didn’t last long and quietly disappeared, but it hinted at YouTube’s willingness to play with unconventional ideas for personalization.

More recently, YouTube introduced a button to strip away those annoying pop-ups at the end of videos – the floating prompts to subscribe, watch another video, or click a playlist. Removing that noise is another sign that the platform is trying to refine the viewing experience, getting rid of some of the visual clutter that has built up over the years.

Seen together, all of these moves – from small feedback prompts to experimental color themes to the new “Your Custom Feed” chatbot – show a platform that knows its recommendation engine is both its greatest strength and its biggest source of frustration. YouTube is trying, in fits and starts, to hand some of the steering wheel back to you.

Where this could lead next

If “Your Custom Feed” proves successful, it’s not hard to imagine YouTube expanding the idea. You might eventually create multiple named feeds – one prompt for “learning mode” with tutorials and lectures, another for “brain–off entertainment” with memes and vlogs. You could temporarily mute certain topics (no politics for a month, please), or ask the AI to surface smaller creators instead of the same massive channels that dominate your recommendations.

At its best, this shift could make the YouTube home page feel less like a slot machine and more like a tool you can shape. At its worst, it could become just another layer of complexity that nudges you to share even more data in order to fix problems the algorithm created in the first place.

For now, “Your Custom Feed” is still an experiment that many users can’t even access. But it’s also a clear signal. The future of YouTube – and of social platforms more broadly – is heading toward AI you talk to, not just algorithms that watch you. The big question is whether that conversation will genuinely empower users, or simply become a more polite face on the same old attention machine.