Faceless YouTube Shorts, made with AI.

A faceless YouTube Short is a vertical video where the creator never appears: the story is carried by narration, pictures and on-screen captions. Shortmint makes every part of one from a single line of text, so a faceless channel needs no camera, no recording and no editing software.

What "faceless" means in practice

Most faceless channels are built from the same four parts: a script, a voice, a set of pictures and captions. Done by hand, that's four tools and an evening per video. Shortmint does it in about ten minutes, on one Mac. The usual shortcut, stock footage under a text-to-speech voice, is also why so many faceless Shorts look alike and get swiped past.

Shortmint makes each part for the topic in front of it:

• The script runs about 30 seconds in six parts: a 4-second hook, then mystery, explanation, payoff, twist and call to action. One spoken sentence per scene.
• The pictures are generated one per scene in your channel's style, with diagrams where something needs explaining. You can upload your own for any scene.
• The voice comes from a library of natural narration voices and speaking rates. Press play to hear one before you choose.
• The captions are big and styled, and light up word by word as they're spoken, because most Shorts are watched with the sound off.
• The movement is chosen per shot, a push-in on a close-up or a pan across a wide picture, so nothing on screen sits still.

Why some faceless Shorts get watched and others don't

The BioCurious channel is made entirely this way, and its numbers say something useful about faceless content. Shorts that asked the viewer to do something with their own body while watching ("lift your ring finger", "find your blind spot") were watched far longer than Shorts that only stated a fact. The best of them kept viewers for — of the video on average, per YouTube Analytics. The ring-finger Short pulled about 295 views a day in its first five days, in mid-October 2026, when most of the channel's older videos were getting under 30.

Where those views came from matters too. According to the BioCurious channel's YouTube Analytics, between 6 and 20 October 2026, 87% of the channel's views came from the Shorts feed and about 10% from search. A faceless Short lives or dies in the feed, in the first two seconds.

Three things followed from that, and Shortmint now builds them in:

1. Open on an action, not a question. The first line is an instruction the viewer can follow with the phone in their hand. "Did you know" openings aren't allowed.
2. Pay off by second ten. The result of the test is named early. Videos that made viewers wait for it lost half of them.
3. Plain titles. On that channel, titles with an emoji averaged 2.5 views a day against about 30 for titles without. Titles are now written short, with the body part and the surprise in them, and no emoji.

How to start a faceless Shorts channel with Shortmint

1. Pick a niche you can make a hundred videos about. Science, history, money and psychology all work. A faceless channel lives on volume and a consistent voice.
2. Save a template. Voice, pace, picture style and captions are stored together, so every video sounds and looks like the same channel.
3. Queue your ideas. Type them one at a time, or upload a .txt, .csv or .json file with one topic per line. When the queue runs out, it suggests topics your channel has not covered yet.
4. Read the first few before they go out. Every video can be edited line by line, and any single picture can be redrawn without redoing the rest.
5. Turn on the schedule. Videos are made and uploaded at the times you set. See YouTube Shorts automation for how the upload side works.

Faceless Shorts and monetisation

YouTube doesn't ban AI narration or faceless channels. The YouTube Partner Program opens ad revenue at 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 public watch hours in 12 months or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days. What it refuses for the Partner Program is content that's repetitive or reused: the same template with the words swapped, or clips taken from someone else. Each Shortmint Short has its own script, its own pictures and its own narration, written for its topic. Whether the channel as a whole is worth subscribing to is still your call, and it's the part no tool can make for you.

What you need

A Mac with Node.js 22. Rendering tools come bundled. Connecting YouTube takes about ten minutes once. Script writing, narration and rendering are free; pictures use free image tiers, which have daily limits the schedule paces itself around.