A new report found that 21% of YouTube Shorts are AI slop. Or, if you want to be generous about it, AI-generated content.
The study comes from Kapwing, an online editing platform. To get there, they analyzed the top 15,000 YouTube channels, or the top 100 channels from every country. And surprisingly, or not surprisingly if you’ve been paying attention, hundreds of those channels publish nothing but AI slop. Combined, they’ve racked up more than 63 billion views and over 220 million subscribers.
Digging deeper into the data, Kapwing found that not only is 1 in 5 Shorts AI-generated, but a staggering 33% fall into what the kids lovingly refer to as “brainrot.”
These videos are low-quality, soulless, slop-pile content. They’re like an overcooked, brainless gumbo of audio and visuals meant to… honestly, I’m not sure what they’re meant to do. They aren’t entertaining. They aren’t funny. They just exist. You can see the lack of effort immediately. Endless auto-edits. Random images looping over and over. The same tired memes stitched together on repeat.
Not long ago, my daughter stumbled onto Bluey brainrot videos, and I clocked it instantly as something that would melt a brain. That was before I even knew “brainrot” was the ironic term the creators themselves embraced.
Then there’s the darker side of it.
I started noticing that many of these videos were stuffed with inappropriate adult imagery. I reported them. Over and over again. YouTube did nothing.
One channel in particular pushed X-rated images in every single video. So I made it my personal mission to report each new upload as it came in. Week after week. The result? One video taken down. The channel kept pumping out the same garbage nonstop. And that was just one channel out of God knows how many.
I genuinely don’t understand what YouTube is doing to stop this tidal wave of low-effort AI content from swallowing the platform. Or worse, maybe they’re perfectly fine with it.
And that’s the real issue here. At the end of the day, Google is allowing
