TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds

Jun 16, 2026 11:09 PM - 5 days ago 6938

About 59% of TikTok videos served to a caller account’s For You provender are AI slop, according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation instrumentality company. That’s astir 3 times the complaint Kapwing recovered connected YouTube.

The institution manually reviewed complete 10,000 TikTok videos crossed 20 categories and ran a abstracted fresh-account test, counting AI-generated contented successful the first 500 For You videos.

How TikTok Compares To YouTube

Kapwing ran the aforesaid fresh-account trial connected YouTube and recovered that 104 of the first 500 Shorts, aliases 21%, were AI slop. On TikTok, 294 of 500 For You videos deed that threshold.

I covered Kapwing’s YouTube findings and the broader AI slop problem successful March. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan had besides named AI slop arsenic a contented value rumor the institution was building discovery systems for.

By November, TikTok had already branded 1.3 cardinal videos arsenic AI-generated, according to the report.

Kids Content Has The Highest Concentration

Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed successful TikTok’s Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest complaint of immoderate class successful the analysis.

The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, wherever 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags for illustration #cartoons and #babysong some reached 83%, and #forkids came successful astatine 79%.

Which Categories Are Most Affected

After Kids, the adjacent highest AI slop rates were successful Science and Education (35%), Health (33%), and History (33%). All 3 are categories wherever ocular illustration and voiceover narration dress up overmuch of the content.

On the different end, categories wherever on-camera beingness aliases beingness objection are cardinal had the lowest rates. Fashion came successful astatine 1.3%, Music astatine 1.5%, and Fitness astatine 1.6%.

How Kapwing Collected The Data

The report’s methodology started pinch a database of 20 celebrated TikTok categories and astatine slightest 3 of the astir celebrated tags for each. Kapwing’s squad past manually checked the featured videos connected each tag’s page, counting AI slop versus non-AI slop contented and combining the results by category. That produced the category-level percentages from a excavation of 10,742 videos.

For the new-user test, the squad created a caller TikTok relationship and scrolled done 500 For You videos, signaling which ones were AI slop. The 59% fig comes from that single-account test.

The study defines AI slop arsenic videos pinch evident AI-generated visuals, on pinch low-quality compilations utilizing intelligibly AI-generated scripts and voiceovers.

For transparency, Kapwing is simply a video editing and creation platform. The institution has a commercialized liking successful measuring the spread betwixt human-made and AI-generated content.

Why This Matters

Brands producing TikTok contented are entering a provender wherever automated contented whitethorn outweigh human-made videos for caller users. For children’s contented specifically, the attraction is higher.

TikTok added personification controls for AI content, but information suggests that what caller users spot by default still leans heavy toward AI-generated videos.

Looking Ahead

Kapwing has now published AI slop reports for some YouTube and TikTok.

YouTube has responded to its slop problem pinch discovery systems and monetization argumentation changes. TikTok has added user-facing controls. Whether those interventions are changing what caller users really spot hasn’t been measured.


Featured Image: FotoField/Shutterstock

Category News TikTok
Follow Us On Google
More