Imagine you are 3 years old. I gorged myself on expensive berries for an afternoon snack and have no idea what the Strait of Hormuz is. Life is good. Give your mom or dad your cell phone to watch a video while they need to take a bathroom break and strange sounds and smells are occurring behind the closed door.
We see a cartoon in which a boy with a face of the Cocomelon phenotype plays with several colored balloons and a red toy truck that looks suspiciously like Lightning McQueen from “Cars.”
Something is a little different, but it’s not entirely clear what it is. Is it possible that balloons sometimes have two knots, or when a clear water balloon bursts, paint shoots out instead of water? Although this goes against some early observations about the natural world, the video is certainly interesting. If you can read, you may see a small label at the bottom of the TikTok app that says “Contains AI-generated media.” But you and probably most of the other 280,000 viewers of this video can’t read.
There are AI slops aimed at kids, especially in cartoons aimed at toddlers and preschoolers on YouTube. AI-generated videos with color and text are also ubiquitous on TikTok, according to a new report from video editing software company Kapwing.
The report analyzed thousands of TikTok videos with kid-friendly hashtags and classified more than half of them as AI slop. Kapwing defines this as “inadvertent, low-quality content that is generated using automated computer applications and distributed to a farm’s viewers or subscribers, or that sways political opinion.” Videos were classified as crap if they bore TikTok’s AI-generated content label or, in some cases, contained obvious signs of generated AI.
AI is prevalent elsewhere in the app as well, the report says. Kapwing created a new TikTok account (without a specific age identifier) and said that 59% of the content on the For You page is some form of AI slop.
It’s a dark story, but it’s most dire when you compare the level of AI targeting children to other categories. Here’s what they found:
We checked a sample of 10,742 TikTok videos across the 20 most popular tags in categories and noted the number of AI and non-AI slop videos. The category with the highest slop density by far was Kids (57.4%). More details are provided below. Science and education (35.0%), health (33.8%), and history (33.5%) are the top choices. In the top 9 categories, more than 1 in 10 videos were AI slops. However, videos in the fitness (1.6%), music (1.5%), and fashion (1.3%) categories are almost entirely human-created.
(It’s important to note here that Kapwing makes video editing software; they are not a research company or a child advocacy organization. They are also a competitor to CapCut, a popular app owned by ByteDance along with TikTok). TikTok did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
When Kapwing looked deeper into children’s content, we found:
Of the 2,000 featured videos analyzed in the Kids category on TikTok, approximately 1,147 (57.4%) were generated by AI. The tag that had the biggest impact, #cartoonkids, consisted almost entirely of dirty jokes, with only three of the 100 videos we checked being created by humans. About a third or more of the videos for almost every tag we checked were AI slops, and even #babytok, which has significantly fewer slops than other tags, had 1 in 10 tag pages with slop videos.
Of course, AI is so prevalent in animation that it’s no surprise that #cartoonkids are significantly sloppier. However, Kapwing also found that 83% of videos with the hashtag #babysong qualify as AI slop, as do 77% of #nurseryrhyme videos and 52% of #kidslearning.
Yay!
I want to pause here and point out that TikTok is not the ideal place for young children. Unlike the dedicated YouTube Kids app, TikTok does not have a dedicated separate app for under-13s. (TikTok has a teen experience for ages 13-17 that allows parents to link their accounts and monitor and control the experience, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. It’s more geared toward toddlers and preschoolers.)
TikTok allows users under the age of 13 to sign up for a very exclusive experience with content carefully selected for kids.
I tested this by signing up for a new TikTok account with a birth year of 2020. As I scrolled through my feed, the top videos were sloppy. There were animal videos, coloring and art videos, soccer and unpacking videos. It’s not the most fulfilling, but I didn’t notice any AI degradation initially.
Searching for hashtags like #nurseryrhymes or #kidscartoons However, on my own adult account, I see a lot of content, some of which has been viewed millions of times. Obviously some young children are watching this on an adult account. My guess is that parents give their phones to their kids to watch videos when they want to distract themselves.
What does this kid slop look like?
Imagine spending hours training an AI on Cocomelon. As a result, we somehow end up yearning for the relatively “human” emotion of classic YouTube Kids shows like “Johnny Johnny Yes Dad.”
These videos are produced on a large scale for commercial purposes and are not necessarily educationally sound on a fundamental level. Emily Tate Sullivan recently reported for Mother Jones about the prevalence of kid-friendly AI slop on YouTube and how experts are worried about how young brains absorb it and how low-quality it can be.
Videos about vowels include visuals of consonants. Additionally, characters that do not match the audio overlay will appear on the screen. A video that promises to teach you about 50 years of the United States. The names of the disbanded states will appear in text at the bottom of the screen, such as Livio Island, Conmecticat, Oklolodia, and Lugithria, and each state will sing. Videos about the seven continents often show compasses with four or more points and illegible symbols where “N,” “S,” “E,” and “W” should be.
Isn’t it amazing!
I try to be unbiased about some of the AI-generated videos that are flooding social networks. Surreal and strange things, such as a melodrama that personifies a fruit’s affair, are really interesting, so I think adults can also enjoy them to some extent.
However, it feels opportunistic to target infants and small children, who don’t even know whether the product was generated by AI or not. My personal feeling on this is that it’s good to let kids watch funny videos every now and then, but sometimes adults need a break too. I’m not the screen time police here, never have been. However, based on my limited review, many of these videos are not quality educational content, even if the video title includes the word “learning”.