What counts as reused content on YouTube?

Content taken from elsewhere and republished without meaningful original contribution. The test is transformation, not source.

What triggers it: unedited clips from other creators, compilations with no commentary, slideshows of stock footage over text, and content whose only change is a filter or a music bed.

What doesn't: commentary over a clip, original scripts read aloud, analysis, criticism, and educational explanation — even when the underlying facts came from elsewhere.

Where AI-generated video sits is the question people actually want answered. Using AI to produce a video is not itself reused content, because nothing was taken from another creator. But an AI-generated video that adds nothing — a fact list anyone could produce from the same prompt — can still fail the review on the original-contribution half of the test.

The practical line: the tooling is never the problem, the absence of a point of view is.