2w ago

More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds

www.theguardian.com More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds

Low-quality AI-generated content is now saturating social media – and generating about $117m a year, data shows

More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.

The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.

Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.

The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.

The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.

Technology @lemmy.world

More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds

www.theguardian.com /technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds

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62 comments

It’s become unbearable, as has 90% of the web.
- 90% of the web is porn tho...
  
  AI generated porn

Once Peertube's able to provide the minimal feature parity, I'd bet that most would abandon YouTube similar to what happened with Reddit and Lemmy
- I do not think anywhere near most Reddit users came to Lemmy. I wish it were true.
  Do we know if Lemmy mods are doing quality content moderation? That and their locking out open source and third-parties is why I mostly avoid Reddit. But I'm not entirely gone.
  
  and according to fediverse observer, lemmy has been losing a lot of users...
  on the other hand, according to statista, reddit has been gaining users and now has more than when the lemmy exodus happened
  the truth is that what we did didn't affect them as much as we expected, and most people don't care as well :(
  but well, let's keep the flame alive and not lose hope
  
  Anecdotally, my closest friends are all senior level tech workers who are fully aware of what reddit did and the current state of everything, but I'm the only person that's left for Lemmy. They are all still regulars on Reddit. In the same vein, I've written off doing business with many companies due to their shitty practice. Other than my sister also dropping Target, I'm the only person that I know that has stopped giving business to shit companies.
  So yea, unfortunately the reality is that the vast vast majority of people just don't care enough change even the smallest of behaviours for ethical reasons. I mentioned something today at my family Christmas that I don't buy Reign energy drinks anymore because I stopped buying PepsiCo after they rolled back DEI. The response was, "get over yourself". That's probably the above average response for most people I know.
- Not at all. Scaling is an issue with P2P video, which is the basis of how Peertube works. Also, FFS, like 0.01% of Reddit is on Lemmy. They talk themselves out of Lemmy in real time in any thread where it comes up.
  For real, sometimes it's OK to just serve a smaller community with better truth.
  
  Isn't the whole point of peer to peer to automatically and transparently scale with the number of devices accessing the information?
  If every viewer maintains a cache of the most recent videos it's reproduced and shares them back, then the more interest there is in a video the more distributed it will be and the less load there'll be on the original holster.
  Seems to work fine for torrents (though needing to stream the chunks in a set order instead of randomly does add some inefficiency).
  Of course you need a proper client to do that, can't just use a browser (except maybe with an extension acting as the client), and I've got no idea if that's how peertube works (if it doesn't, the name is disingenuous and false advertising), but it's how it should work, if it ever wants to be able to compete with googles datacentres.
- i think that's cope unfortunately
  
  It really is, YouTube to the best of my knowledge stands alone in the service they offer.
  Anyone can, at no cost to them, create an account, edit and upload a video up to 12 hours long I believe, and in decent quality. They also have a revenue sharing system where a creator with enough of a viewership base can get a cut, often more than half, of the ad revenue from their videos.
  I don't believe anyone else does that, outside of uploading SFW content to Pornhub or something.

shit the internet has become a toilet and I have to go outside and look around and talk to people but everyone's on the internet now I'm fucked
- Unironically, a lot of cultural sociologists I follow on bluesky/mastadon are saying that being offline and meeting people through niche hobby spaces and your existing extended social circles is starting to see an uptick, with a lot of younger people seeing posting on major social media or dating apps as "cringe". You're at the forefront of what's cool, nutsack.
- welcome to your life
  There's no turning back
- There's always the homeless encampments.

A telling thing is that apparently Youtube's algorithm knows that these videos are AI slop. I suspect this because at the outset I was aggressively disrecommending any of these that Youtube suggested to me, and basically nothing like them shows up in my feed anymore. Every once in a while one still slips through, usually some manner of synthetic music thing, and I hit the ol' three dots and choose "not interested" and then "don't recommend this channel" and I never see it again.
What's much more concerning is that the average user (i.e. non tech people, i.e. practically everybody) is being handed this shit by default and in my lifetime of experience of people already being widely unable to distinguish truth from blatant manipulative fantasy, the prevalence of false/misleading/nonsense/fabricated AI bullshit being constantly peddled inches from their eyeballs is absolutely eroding peoples' already limited ability to think.
- Interesting, wonder if my watch history having some e.g. Penn & Teller: BS! is why they’ve never dared push me slop… OK, brainrot slop at least, maybe something's slipped through.
  (Haven’t touched the “don’t recommend” stuff that I can recall over these years… er, decades perhaps, whew)
  Obvy could be any one of a million reasons. Could’ve been A/B Test Group B while you were Group A!

I remember a panic some years back about YT funnels of cartoon content aimed at kids, that would lead to weird and sometimes disturbing stuff like "elsa ariel and moana drown together" ... I guess the algo has evolved to target nonchildren now
Garbage site, even if the Alphabet CEO wasn't an oligarch fash toady. Happily running health scam woo ads and refuses to act on reporting of scam advertising.

And the comments are so obviously bots as well, they're so polite and saying compliments, and the same comment over and over by different accounts, just bots watching bot videos.
- What a great use of energy and infrastructure! Good thing those are free in our post scarcity society.

Rise of the small web
- Where
  
  https://fediring.net/
  here's your starting point on the veritable "web" as in "the cyberspace website megacomplex", not as in "the virtual corporate paradise"
  Challenge of the day: get 10 hyperlinks deep from that webpage
  
  Here?

If I had never used YT before, that shit would turn me off of it so hard.
- But who has never used youtube? Kids are already getting used to it in such a way that it's probably becoming hardwired into the brain...
- Right? It's gonna be like facebook where if you ever interacted with it the first time you'd ask yourself why people use it. This is good for us

My niece loves these things. I’m super unhappy about it.

20% of videos shown aren't AI slop

I report each one. And then I tell YouTube I never want to see anything from that channel again. I even pay for premium because I don't want ads and I want to support some content creators (not shorts, no AI, etc). But this AI shit is really making me wonder what I'm even paying for?
- Sadly, you're paying for the fascists in Google's leadership to continue pushing alt right pipeline crap to people in the default YouTube feeds, all over the world.
  I'm sure a small sliver of your payments go to the content creators you support though, so there's that.
  
  And yet you participate in society! I am very intelligent.

The dead internet is here.

"Let's get those numbers up!" - TechLord, Profiteering Destroyer of Culture

i havent found you tube interesting in years. I also use 3rd party viewers if I have to watch something there so there is no algorithym to suggest anything.
Works better that way.
- Most people that I follow post videos there, can't help but use it unfortunately.
  
  You can use a third party tool to keep track of what you want to see, more or less anonymously subscribing.
- probably why you haven't found anything interesting in years
  
  Could be. But the article here tells me it would all have been garbage recommended to me anyways.

Why would concentration-of-wealth-archy/moneyarchy types complain about industriously-enforcing that humankind become mechanically-enforced carrion?
If parasitism is profitable, AND the only purpose of lives is for parasites to feed-on the helpless/carrion lives of their inferiors, then that is exactly what they want, isn't it?
For people who aren't in the rightful-parasite class, .. then it's obviously a problem, but the ROOT problem is simply that the ones who commit within the life-exists-to-serve-money narcissism .. includes many who objectively are helpless-prey, because they identify with the rightful-parasites-class..
( ALL class-systems are driven by people enforcing the class-regime because they identify with higher-class-than-they-are-objectively-in, & thereby class-systems are robust things, controlling social-evolution at scale.
Brexit seems to have been partly the result of the class-system+"royals" orientation of the English people: their unconsciously-presumed-entitlement made them immune to evidence, & they broke their success-momentum for ideological fraud, exactly as class-based-validity ITSELF is ideological-fraud..
So, class-based-"validity" is a "gateway ideology", then, evidence shows.
( I wouldn't have seen it if such prejudice hadn't made my-life its puppet through decades, & then cracked just how fundamental prejudice is, cracking it, & seeing what it had done to others through/with my life ) )
_ /\ _

If I was into this kind of stuff, there are so many get rich quick schemes like - I could be creating ai slop and making side hustle or I could be selling merch to maga and then closing shop.

So this is what the power grids burn for?

I mean I'm all for anti-furry propaganda, but AI slop really has gotten out of hand.
- Nice rage-bait bro.

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