Low-quality AI-generated content is now saturating social media – and generating about $117m a year, data shows

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.

  • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    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 ) )

    _ /\ _