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.
It’s become unbearable, as has 90% of the web.
90% of the web is porn tho…
AI generated porn
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!
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.
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.
Rise of the small web
Where
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
Lemmy is so weird.
So much of it is carried over from Reddit but then you have these flashes of something new bubbling up to the surface, instants of clear distinction where Lemmy culture is branching off from the rest of the internet.
I pray that we look back at this time fondly as the beginning of something great, and not with remorse standing outside a burnt down house.
With a can full of gas a hand full of matches.
And still no one found out.
I just went through the german language links in the list and the third one I clicked was already full of AI generated crap:
Alas, this webring has alot of techbros who does not see the problem in the overuse of genAIs, and even if they kind of pollute the creativity of the web, they are in their right here (it’s the biggest webring i have found to it’s unfortunately expected).
I usually avoid those. You might want to check the no AI webring
On link #10 I ended up here which is an awesome idea for a site. Basically a museum of popular websites covering all time periods.
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.
20% of videos shown aren’t AI slop
My niece loves these things. I’m super unhappy about it.
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.
Do you have any recommendations?
FreeTube
Invidious had been good to me
Freetune works for me, on a roku I use playlet, on android there are a few others.
There was a good recommendation on here the other day, but I didn’t write it down.
You also can create playlists in various media players like VLC.
I would highly encourage whoever you really like to head over to nebula. I know paying seems not great but they do get a portion of that money and there are no ads.
I have a pretty good time with New Pipe but I’ve heard others haven’t had the good experience I have.
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.
So this is what the power grids burn for?
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.
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 ) )
_ /\ _
