After talking about cracking down for months, YouTube favoring slop over its human creators has finally come to an end: the video platform is removing and gutting the top slop channels. This comes days after the CEO, Neal Mohan, targeted "low-quality AI content" in a recent blog post about "managing AI slop."
The rise of AI has raised concerns about low-quality content, aka "AI slop." As an open platform, we allow for a broad range of free expression while ensuring YouTube remains a place where people feel good spending their time. Over the past 20 years, we've learned not to impose any preconceived notions on the creator ecosystem. Today, once-odd trends like ASMR and watching other people play video games are mainstream hits. But with this openness comes a responsibility to maintain the high quality viewing experience that people want. To reduce the spread of low quality AI content, we're actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combatting spam and clickbait, and reducing the spread of low quality, repetitive content.
At The Verge, Emma Roth summarizes the findings of Kapwing, itself an AI video-generating company.
Kapwing found that a channel called CuentosFacianantes no longer exists on the platform after amassing more than 5.9 million subscribers and over 1.2 billion total views. … The second channel on its list, Imperio de Jesus (Empire of Jesus), is also no longer available on YouTube and had over 5.8 million subscribers. … 16 other AI slop channels on Kapwing's list have either been deleted or no longer have any videos on YouTube
The tipping point seems to have been all those fake AI movie trailers: popular, fake-news-adjacent, and upsetting to a YouTube-adjacent industry and the real-life celebrities being deepfaked by them.
I will admit to a weird fascination with the Star Wars prequel-to-the-prequels stuff : as wooden and sloptastic as they are, the AI-mangled flashes of "nonstarwars" physical acting from greats such as Christopher Lee or Samuel L. Jackson is … interesting.
