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.

  • recursive_recursion@piefed.ca
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    23 hours ago

    Once Peertube’s able to provide the minimal feature parity, I’d bet that most would abandon YouTube similar to what happened with Reddit and Lemmy

      • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        It really is, YouTube to the best of my knowledge stands alone in the service they offer.

        Anyone can, at no cost to them, create an account, edit and upload a video up to 12 hours long I believe, and in decent quality. They also have a revenue sharing system where a creator with enough of a viewership base can get a cut, often more than half, of the ad revenue from their videos.

        I don’t believe anyone else does that, outside of uploading SFW content to Pornhub or something.

    • ynthrepic@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      I do not think anywhere near most Reddit users came to Lemmy. I wish it were true.

      Do we know if Lemmy mods are doing quality content moderation? That and their locking out open source and third-parties is why I mostly avoid Reddit. But I’m not entirely gone.

      • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Anecdotally, my closest friends are all senior level tech workers who are fully aware of what reddit did and the current state of everything, but I’m the only person that’s left for Lemmy. They are all still regulars on Reddit. In the same vein, I’ve written off doing business with many companies due to their shitty practice. Other than my sister also dropping Target, I’m the only person that I know that has stopped giving business to shit companies.

        So yea, unfortunately the reality is that the vast vast majority of people just don’t care enough change even the smallest of behaviours for ethical reasons. I mentioned something today at my family Christmas that I don’t buy Reign energy drinks anymore because I stopped buying PepsiCo after they rolled back DEI. The response was, “get over yourself”. That’s probably the above average response for most people I know.

      • morto@piefed.social
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        21 hours ago

        and according to fediverse observer, lemmy has been losing a lot of users…

        on the other hand, according to statista, reddit has been gaining users and now has more than when the lemmy exodus happened

        the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(

        but well, let’s keep the flame alive and not lose hope

        • WhatTheDuck@piefed.social
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          14 hours ago

          I highly doubt Reddit is actually gaining that many new users, but the number of accounts created? Sure.

          Reddit never has enough bots for their AI slop machine. They create more bot accounts to “boost engagement” via posts and comments.

        • MBech@feddit.dk
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          20 hours ago

          Honestly, I wouldn’t really want everyone on Reddit to come here. With the risk of sounding like some immigrant hating dickbag, they just bring their dumb takes and bot farms with them. What makes Lemmy good right now, is that it’s so small and intimate.

          • morto@piefed.social
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            19 hours ago

            At least with lemmy we can make our server and defederate with the bigger ones if things get bad like that

        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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          21 hours ago

          the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(

          Most people don’t really care about anything. They won’t put up with a little inconvenience. Worse than toddlers.

          • sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz
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            14 hours ago

            That’s what I was thinking too. I browse r/all once in a while just to see what’s going on, and both the posts and comment sections are AI cesspools

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      22 hours ago

      Not at all. Scaling is an issue with P2P video, which is the basis of how Peertube works. Also, FFS, like 0.01% of Reddit is on Lemmy. They talk themselves out of Lemmy in real time in any thread where it comes up.

      For real, sometimes it’s OK to just serve a smaller community with better truth.

      • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 hours ago

        Isn’t the whole point of peer to peer to automatically and transparently scale with the number of devices accessing the information?

        If every viewer maintains a cache of the most recent videos it’s reproduced and shares them back, then the more interest there is in a video the more distributed it will be and the less load there’ll be on the original holster.

        Seems to work fine for torrents (though needing to stream the chunks in a set order instead of randomly does add some inefficiency).

        Of course you need a proper client to do that, can’t just use a browser (except maybe with an extension acting as the client), and I’ve got no idea if that’s how peertube works (if it doesn’t, the name is disingenuous and false advertising), but it’s how it should work, if it ever wants to be able to compete with googles datacentres.

        • hansolo@lemmy.today
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          5 hours ago

          As I understand it from an admittedly limited technical knowledge, it’s, yes, much like torenting video by getting the packets in order. So server capacity and the bandwidth of users hosting the video both need to be consistently high for anything to really go viral and not just crash servers. Basically, unless seeders are cultivated for popular videos, there’s always a low ceiling for any video before it maxes out it’s ability to be watched simultaneously.

        • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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          5 hours ago

          it already works in browsers. other clients would need to implement it themselves. I have no idea if this is viable with battery powered devices on a data cap