TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds (searchenginejournal.com) 30
"About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account's For You feed are AI slop," writes Search Engine Journal, "according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That's roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube."
The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, counting AI-generated content in the first 500 For You videos. Kapwing ran the same fresh-account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the first 500 Shorts, or 21%, were AI slop. On TikTok, 294 of 500 For You videos hit that threshold...
Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed in TikTok's Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest rate of any category in the analysis. The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags like #cartoons and #babysong both reached 83%, and #forkids came in at 79%. After Kids, the next highest AI slop rates were in Science and Education (35%), Health (33%), and History (33%). All three are categories where visual illustration and voiceover narration make up much of the content.
On the other end, categories where on-camera presence or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates. Fashion came in at 1.3%, Music at 1.5%, and Fitness at 1.6%.
The article notes that by last November, TikTok "had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report."
Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed in TikTok's Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest rate of any category in the analysis. The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags like #cartoons and #babysong both reached 83%, and #forkids came in at 79%. After Kids, the next highest AI slop rates were in Science and Education (35%), Health (33%), and History (33%). All three are categories where visual illustration and voiceover narration make up much of the content.
On the other end, categories where on-camera presence or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates. Fashion came in at 1.3%, Music at 1.5%, and Fitness at 1.6%.
The article notes that by last November, TikTok "had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report."
Must be mostly slop then (Score:4, Interesting)
Because Youtube is about half AI slop these days. At least given the kinds of video topics I might be interested in. It's kind of discouraging. Some of them actually are now marked as AI generated. I generally stop watching channels that I find or suspect are AI, even if the material appears to be accurate. I just can't support creators who don't actually create.
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Alas, pretty soon you won't even be able to find real porn.
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You must be somebody that watches porn for the character development and the story...
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You must be somebody that watches porn for the character development and the story...
Actually, I like watching the stunt men and special effects.
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Because Youtube is about half AI slop these days.
If "3x more" means proportional, then TT must be about 150% slop.
Probably a pretty good estimate...
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Because Youtube is about half AI slop these days. At least given the kinds of video topics I might be interested in. It's kind of discouraging. Some of them actually are now marked as AI generated. I generally stop watching channels that I find or suspect are AI, even if the material appears to be accurate. I just can't support creators who don't actually create.
So that means Tiktok is 150% AI slop... Yes the maths was done by AI on that one.
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You might want to train your algorithm a bit. Mark obvious AI channels as "Not Interested in this content". Make sure you're subscribing to non-AI channels that you like
Obviously in my subscription feed I get 0% AI, but even in my homepage/recommended I get no more than 5% or so AI recommendations.
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It gets a bit better when you systematically do "do not recommend channel" on all the YouTube slop, but it is still bad. In particular, channels pushing complete fabrications vor views are apparently totally fine for YT these days. Personally, I just have a small number of people for whom I look at content, and apart from the (rare) doom-scrolling, I ignore the rest.
Human slop or AI slop (Score:3)
What is the difference?
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One is made by humans, the other by AI. Next question.
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While true, the point is kinda that there's very little content of value on tiktok regardless.
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happens after
US companies
force a take over.
Is this a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never experienced TikTok; but everything I've heard leads me to believe that even before AI became so pervasive,` the platform had way, way more slop than YouTube. Presumably, a greater affinity for slop in general implies a greater incidence of AI slop.
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I think part of it is that TikTok is short format, and current AI video generators fit that. Also it is probably easier to monetize slop on TikTok. And a lot of people doomscrolling, the algorithm is feeding you. All of that leads to it probably being the biggest experimentation ground for AI video, if I took a guess (and I am not really that into social media tbh, just slashdot, reddit and tiktok). Funnily enough if you are interested in AI, current events and video art tiktok is pretty good, they have som
I just checked TikTok - they right (Score:3)
TikTok was already Slop !!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't TikTok Basically Demand You Post Slop? (Score:3)
I mean, it's built on the idea of creating very short form videos. With the advent of 10-second AI video generation, TikTok is basically the perfect fit for it. Someone can just keep feeding AI prompts and indiscriminately posting the resulting videos. There's almost zero thought process required. But if some of the videos hit... profit! There's no downside for the AI slop factory.
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That's why they compared it with YouTube shorts, which is basically YouTube's TikTok replica.
In the long run it does not matter (Score:2)
New AI will train on old AI created slop. And the pattern repeats ad infinitum. Until all is slop. BTW, that means TT is ahead of YT in the slop race.
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Most likely the next step change in AI improvement will come from the next generation learning from today's LLMs and diffusion models. But not being trained on their output. More likely they will be evaluated by current AI.
AI advancements have a predictable pattern. First we mimic how humans do something, then we use those AIs to evaluate the next generation which learns how to do it without mimicking humans. LLMs have been trained on human output and work by trying to determine what a human would do in any
poor YouTube (Score:2)
I hope they can turn it around and keep up with market trends.
Why does it matter? (Score:2)
First AI came for the low effort slop, but I don't watch low effort slop so I don't care...
The End.
AI Slop Since New Ownership (Score:2)