YouTube has changed over the years.
After starting as an online repository for independent video makers, it has evolved into a platform for everything from music videos to professional content creation.
YouTube quick facts
- Started in California in 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
- Originally intended to be a dating portal based on video profiles, YouTube’s first slogan was “Tune in, hook up,” noted Vice.com.
- The first official video on YouTube was published on April 23, 2005. “Me at the zoo” featured a young Karim visiting the San Diego Zoo about a decade prior.
- Google acquired YouTube in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, reported NBC News, by far the largest purchase it had made at the time.
YouTube has also grown into an alternative to cable, serving as a major broadcast partner of the NFL. It has also gotten into both short-form video to compete with social media companies and live event streaming.
Last year, Business of Apps reported that the social media platform generated $36.1 billion in revenue, a 15% year-over-year increase, with the majority of this revenue coming from advertising. It made $14.5 billion from subscriptions.
Shorts, YouTube’s competition for social media short-form videos, has achieved success, with an average of more than 70 billion views per day in 2024.
But while Shorts expands the company’s advertising opportunities, new data suggest that a growing number of videos on the platform are bottom-of-the-barrel trash.
Concerns have emerged regarding the quality of videos posted on YouTube.
Photo by SOPA Images on Getty Images
1 in 5 YouTube Shorts are AI slop
There have been major bumps in the road as the world navigates the artificial intelligence revolution.
If you spend any time on social media, the problem is readily apparent. Although there has been significant progress in the field, AI-generated videos can still appear and feel unnatural, even when used for legitimate purposes, such as language translation.
But AI slop is a different animal.
Related: YouTube’s CEO caps his kids’ screen time: here’s why
The MIT Technology Review describes the slop as “a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram and beyond.”
“‘AI slop’ can and does refer to text, audio, or images. But what’s really broken through this year is the flood of quick AI-generated video clips on social platforms, each produced by a short written prompt fed into an AI mode,” according to the Review.
Thanks to new products that generate the content, such as OpenAI’s Sora, AI slop is taking over social media platforms, including YouTube Shorts.
Researchers at Kapwing wanted to find out just how much AI slop is fed into the average YouTube account, so they created a new one and simulated the experience of an untainted YouTube Shorts algorithm.
Among the first 500 videos the account was shown, 104 (21%) of the first 500 videos were AI-generated, and 165 (33%) of those 500 videos were considered “brain rot” material.
Kapwing defines brain rot as “compulsive, nonsensical, low-quality video content that creates the effect of corroding the viewer’s mental or intellectual state while watching; often generated with AI.”
At one point during the 500-video session, five consecutive videos were nothing but AI-generated slop.
“Whether this prevalence of slop and brain rot on our test feed represents the engineering of YouTube’s algorithm or the sheer proliferation of such videos that are being uploaded is a mystery that only Google can answer,” according to Kapwing.
However, the firm also notes that a separate analysis by the Guardian in July found that nearly one in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels were “showing AI-generated content only.”
The U.S. is a top-3 AI slop consumer
We all live in our own social media bubbles, so it may seem like the majority of AI-slop comes from and is consumed by Westerners, but the data suggest otherwise.
Kapwing identified the top 100 trending AI slop YouTube channels in specific countries and picked out the top producers.
Related: YouTube makes controversial move many viewers won’t like
The top channels in South Korea have been viewed about 8.25 billion times. One channel, which features “photorealistic-style footage of wild animals being defeated by cute household pets,” according to PCMag, has been viewed 2.02 billion times alone.
Pakistan came in second, with the top AI slop channels accumulating 5.34 billion views.
The U.S. was a distant third, with the top AI-generated content channels generating just 3.39 billion views. The top channel in the U.S. was the Spanish-language Cuentos Facientes, which garnered 1.28 billion views.
Experts aren’t worried about AI slop taking over — yet
Recently, the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine also published research on the prevalence of AI slop, but it measured across YouTube and TikTok.
The researchers automated a search of publicly available YouTube and TikTok videos related to 10 search terms. Before being deemed “slop,” AI-generated videos were flagged, then subjected to a two-stage qualitative content analysis to identify and code problematic features.
Of the 1,082 videos screened (814 on YouTube, 268 on TikTok), 57 (5.3%) were deemed likely to be AI-generated and of low quality.
“We find slop to not be especially prevalent on YouTube and TikTok at this time,” the researchers said. “These videos have comparable viewership statistics to the overall population, although the small dataset suggests this finding should be interpreted with caution.”
Still, researchers see danger in the videos.
“From the slop videos that were identified, several features inconsistent with best practices in multimedia instruction were defined.”