Welcome to YouTube in the age of AI videos: a baby trapped in space, a zombie football star, and a cat melodrama: a baby in the universe.
One in 10 of the fastest growing YouTube channels in the world show only AI-generated content as technology breakthroughs drive flooding of artificial content.
Guardian analysis of data from the Analytics Firm Playboard shows that nine of the top 100 fastest-growing channels this July show purely AI-generated content.
Offerings include channels featuring strange stories, such as baby raw on pre-release space rockets, undead Cristiano Ronaldo, and melodrama featuring humanized cats. AI video generation is surged amid the release of powerful tools such as Google's VEO 3 and Elon Musk's Grok Imagine.
The channel has a total of millions of subscribers. This includes 1.6 million in Space Chain toddlers and 3.9 million in Super Cat League.
Many of these videos are considered “AI Slops.” This refers to low quality, mass-produced content. However, some contain a brief, rudimentary plot indications of increasing sophistication in AI-generated content.
YouTube has attempted to block Slop Deluge by blocking the sharing of channels that post recurring “fraud” content, a policy targeting AI content, and ad revenue sharing.
A spokesman for YouTube, owned by Google's parent company, said:
After being contacted by the Guardian about channels that include channels on June's fastest-growing list, YouTube said it had removed three of them from the platform and blocked two more. You did not specify which channels were authorized.
An expert said the AI video generator is telling the next wave of internet “Enshittification.” Created in 2022, Doctorow used it to explain the decline in the quality of users' online experiences, as the platform prioritizes its platform over delivering high-quality content.
“AI Slop is flooded with content that is essentially garbage,” says Dr. Akhil Bhardwaj, an associate professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at Bath University. “This enshittification has ruined the Pinterest online community and flooded YouTube with low-quality content in search of revenue with Spotify artists.”
“One way social media companies can regulate AI slops is to make sure they can't monetize it.
Ryan Broderick, author of the popular Garbage Day Newsletter on Internet culture, wrote last week that YouTube became a “place for dumping AI shorts without an intrusive soul.”
Instagram's reel video feature is also full of AI content. The platform has earned 3.7m views of various celebrity head videos attached to the animal's bodies, starring “rophant” (Dwayne Johnson and the Elephant) and “Emira” (Eminem the Gorilla).
On Tiktok, many AI-generated videos have gone viral, including videos of Abraham Lincoln visiting cats competing on an unfortunate trip to the opera and Olympic diving events. But the Lincoln and Cat Olympics video lies in the slop-era spirit of the internet's playful wit.
Instagram and Tiktok said that all realistic AI content should be labeled. Videos suspected to contain AI from these channels were cross-checked with the Deepfake Detection Service Provider Reality Defender.
Here are the channels with AI video for July:
