A new research shows that 21-33% of YouTube's feed may consist of AI slop

Summary

As the debate over the creative and ethical value of using AI to generate video rages on, users are getting interesting results out of the machine, and artist-led AI content is gaining respect in some areas. Top film schools now offer courses on the use and ethics of AI in film production, and the world’s best-known brands are utilizing AI in their creative process — albeit with mixed results.Sadly, others are gaming the novelty of AI’s prompt-and-go content, using these engines to churn out vast quantities of AI “slop” — the “spam” of the video-first age. Wiktionary defines a slopper as “Someone who is overreliant on generative AI tools such as ChatGPT; a producer of AI slop.” Along with the proliferation of “brainrot” videos online, sloppers are making it tough for principled and talented creators to get their videos seen. AI Slop: Careless, low-quality content generated using automatic computer applications and distributed to farm views and subscriptions or sway political opinion.Brainrot: 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. The main point of AI slop and brainrot videos is to grab your attention, and this type of content seems harder and harder to avoid. But exactly how prevalent is it in the grand scheme of things? Kapwing analyzed the view and subscriber counts of trending AI slop and brainrot YouTube channels to find out which ones are competing most fiercely with handmade content around the world and how much revenue the leading sloppers are making.What We DidWe identified the top 100 trending YouTube channels in every country and noted the AI slop channels. Next, we used socialblade.com to retrieve the number of views, subscribers, and estimated yearly revenue for these channels and aggregated these figures for each country to deduce their popularity. We also created a new YouTube account to record the number of AI slop and b...