TikTok, 59% of videos are AI Slop, 'garbage' generated by AI. The situation improves on YouTube

The 59% of videos displayed to a newly created TikTok account turned out to be AI slop, low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence. This was revealed by a report from Kapwing, a video editing platform that reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos distributed across 20 different categories. On YouTube, the same phenomenon affected 21% of the content analyzed in a previous report by the same company, used as a reference for cross-comparison between the two platforms: a ratio of nearly three to one against TikTok.

To arrive at these findings, Kapwing conducted two separate analyses. The first covered 10,742 videos across 20 popular categories on the platform. The second isolated the first 500 videos shown on the For You page of an account created from scratch, with the same test repeated on YouTube for a direct comparison: 294 out of 500 videos on TikTok were considered AI slop, compared to 104 out of 500 for YouTube Shorts.

TikTok serves new accounts a lot of 'garbage' made by AI
The most critical data concerns children's content. In the Kids category of TikTok, 57% of the 2,000 analyzed videos fall under the definition of AI slop, the highest percentage among all categories. The tag #cartoonkids reaches 97%, while #cartoons and #babysong both stand at 83%, and #forkids at 79%. After children's content, the most affected categories are science and education, health, and history, all at 33-35%: subjects where illustrations and voiceovers often replace the real presence of a person in front of the camera.

Conversely, categories where the physical presence of the poster counts record the lowest rates: fashion at 1.3%, music at 1.5%, fitness at 1.6%. The data suggests that generative AI still struggles to replace content that requires direct demonstration or personal recognition, while it takes over where a synthetic voice over illustrative images is sufficient.

The actual number of synthetic content is probably higher than what was recorded: Kapwing only counted scripts and voiceovers that were "clearly" generated by AI, leaving out more ambiguous cases where the line between assisted editing and full generation is less clear. TikTok, for its part, had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated by November of the previous year to the report, indicating that the phenomenon does not even surprise the platform.

One variable plays in favor of users: the highest rates of AI slop concern accounts without any viewing history at all. Training the algorithm with targeted interactions reduces the amount of synthetic content shown, but the mechanism remains the same on both platforms: rewarding the volume of publication ends up incentivizing those who produce synthetic content on a large scale, at the expense of those who continue to film in front of a camera.