21% of videos on YouTube feed are AI 'slop'—research
Twenty-one percent of videos on YouTube Shorts are AI-generated, a recent study found.
Video-editing company Kapwing found that out of the first 500 videos a new user will watch, 104 of them, or 21%, are AI slop, or low-quality content generated with apps and distributed to farm views and subscriptions or sway political opinions.
Meanwhile, 165 of the Shorts, or 33%, are "brainrot" videos, or content—usually AI-generated—that corrodes the viewer's mental or intellectual state.
South Korea emerged as the top country where AI slop YouTube channels have the most views at 8.45 billion. Following suit are Pakistan with 5.34 billion views and the USA with 3.39 billion views. In the Philippines, low-quality AI channels earned 1.16 billion views.
The study also found that eight out of the top 100 trending channels in Spain primarily deliver AI slop, with 20.22 million users subscribed to said accounts. The biggest AI channel, according to the research, posts low-quality Dragon Ball-themed videos, while the second largest posts religious content.
If views on such channels are monetized, some accounts like Indian channel Bandar Apna Dost which rakes in 2.07 billion views, might make over $33.6 million (P1.98 billion). This figure is based on the number of views it gets, as per Social Blade data.
Amid the rise of AI slop on YouTube, the platform created a policy on "repetitious" or "inauthentic" content, stating that it has always been ineligible for monetization. The site is still open to the use of AI and requires disclosure and labeling when content is made with the software.
To conduct its report, Kapwing identified the top 100 trending YouTube channels in every country and isolated the AI slop ones. It retrieved views and subscriber count and estimated yearly revenue via Social Blade. Furthermore, the company created a new YouTube account to record the number of AI-generated videos on Shorts.