1 in 5 YouTube Shorts is AI slop now - and Americans are eating it up

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• A new study shows AI slop makes up more than 20% of YouTube.
• Brainrot, or poor quality content, makes up 33%.
• There's no incentive for creators to try to lessen AI slop.

If you feel like you're seeing a lot more AI-generated slop on YouTube, you're right.

According to a study from video-editing service Kapwing, more than 20% of the Shorts content on YouTube is AI slop, or "careless, low-quality content" made with AI and designed solely to farm views and subscriptions. The study showed that 33% is what's called brainrot, or "compulsive, nonsensical, low-quality video content" (that's often generated with AI).

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To conduct the study, Kapwing took the ...