Why ChatGPT says it can't watch a YouTube video
When you give ChatGPT a YouTube link, it may reply that it can't watch videos, or answer from the page's title and description, which can sound right and still be wrong. OpenAI doesn't document a way for ChatGPT to read a YouTube video from its link. The fix is to give it the words: copy the transcript from WithTranscript and paste it in. Part of giving a YouTube video to an AI assistant.
What is going on
A link is an address, not the video. To answer from a link, an assistant has to fetch something from it, and what it can reliably read is web page text. On a YouTube page, the text that's easy to read is the title and description, not what was said. So ChatGPT either declines or works from those scraps.
Watch for confident guesses
The riskier reply is the one that doesn't refuse: a tidy summary built from the title. If ChatGPT can't point to a timestamp for what it says, it probably didn't have the transcript.
The fix
- Paste the YouTube link into WithTranscript (the box above works).
- Press Copy transcript above the transcript. On a phone it's in the ⋯ menu.
- Paste it into the assistant and ask your question.
Then ask it to cite [m:ss] timestamps, so every point can be checked on WithTranscript.