By: Nick Gambino
A new report finds that 21% of YouTube Shorts are AI slop, or – if you want to be kinder about it – AI-generated.
The study was conducted by Kapwing, an online editing platform. To get these numbers they took a deep look at the 15,000 top YouTube Channels, or the top 100 channels from every country. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly if you’ve been paying attention) hundreds of them only put out AI slop. Altogether they’ve got more than 63 billion views and over 220 million subscribers.
In digging into these YouTube metrics, Kapwing found not only that 1 in 5 Shorts are AI-generated, but a whopping 33% are what the kids call “brainrot.”
These low-quality, soulless, slop-heap videos are the equivalent of an overcooked, brainless gumbo of audio and visuals meant to…I’ll be honest, I don’t know what they’re meant to do. They’re not entertaining, they’re not funny, they just…are. You can see the lack of work and detail. Just repetitive auto-edits of random images playing over and over with the most overused memes spliced in.
Not long ago, my daughter discovered Bluey brainrot videos and I clocked it instantly as something that would rot the brain before I even knew that was the term they’ve ironically embraced to describe the content they are creating.
On the darker side of things, I also found they shoved a ton of inappropriate adult images into these videos. No matter how many times I reported them, YouTube did nothing to stop it.
This one channel did it with every video they posted, so I made it my mission in life to report every new video, full of X-rated imagery, each week. All I had to show for my efforts was one video taken down. The channel just kept churning out these gross videos non-stop. And that was one channel out of God knows how many.
I don’t see what YouTube is doing to stop this tidal wave of low-effort AI content from swallowing their platform. Somehow they seem okay with it.
And at the end of the day, that’s the problem – Google is allowing it.
