How low can we go? You won't believe what junk is trending on YouTube
Low-quality videos generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are proliferating on YouTube, offering a wide range of slop for everyone’s taste.
YouTube may be another platform overtaken by AI slop – low-quality AI-generated videos distributed to farm views and subscriptions.
Kapwing, an online content creation platform, identified the top 100 trending YouTube channels in every country and noted the AI-slop channels.
The analysis reveals that the US-based slop channel Cuentos Facinantes has 5.95 million subscribers, making it the most followed AI slop channel globally.
The channel, which serves up low-quality Dragon Ball-themed videos in Spanish, has attracted over 1.28 billion views. While the channel was established in 2020, the earliest video currently hosted is from as recently as January 2025.
The world’s second-most-subscribed AI slop channel, Imperio de Jesús, is based in Spain, and has 5.87 million subscribers at the time of analysis.
The channel promises to strengthen “faith in Jesus through fun interactive quizzes,” putting the Savior in various scenarios where he must give the correct answer to outwit unholy figures like Satan and the Grinch.
However, the AI slop channel with the most views, Bandar Apna Dost, is based in India, and features a monkey in various human-style situations. With approximately 2.07 billion views, the channel is estimated to have annual earnings of over $4.25 million.
Animals are a common theme in AI slop videos. The second-most-viewed channel is Korea-based Three Minutes Wisdom, which shows unlikely situations from the wild, such as a lion being chased by a warthog.
AI slop has a rather negative connotation among users, yet this type of content is incredibly profitable, as it requires minimal effort to create, can be produced en masse, and users may find it oddly addictive.
Some experts say short, absurd videos serve as a form of escapism for young people overwhelmed by stressful news and unstable political and economic situations.
AI slop can be quite innocent, and for example, it may tell dramatic stories about cats in human situations, such as the “meow meow meow meoooow” videos.
However, a recent report analyzing AI slop on TikTok found that many AI-generated videos sexualize young girls and promote racist narratives, along with producing false news.
Every third YouTube short is brain rot
Brain rot, another type of AI-generated low-quality video that creates the effect of corroding the viewer’s mental or intellectual state, also appears to be flooding YouTube.
The report authors established a new YouTube account to simulate the experience of an untainted YouTube Shorts algorithm. They then calculated the occurrence of AI slop or brainrot videos among the first 500 videos in the feed.
In total, 104 (21%) of the first 500 videos were AI-generated, and 165 (33%) of those 500 videos were brainrot.
The authors wrote, “Whether this prevalence of slop and brainrot on our test feed represents the engineering of YouTube’s algorithm or the sheer proliferation of such videos that are being uploaded is a mystery that only Google can answer.”
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