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| YouTube fed by AI |
For traditional video creators, the dream of building an audience through skill, storytelling, and painstaking editing is crashing into a new, harsh reality. The competition is no longer just the talented creator across town or across oceans. It’s an endless, automated torrent of algorithmic oddities—often called AI slop or brainrot content—designed purely to hijack human attention with absurd, rapidly-cut stimuli.
A new, eye-opening study from the video editing platform Kapwing quantifies this unsettling shift. It reveals that brand-new YouTube users can encounter a feed where up to 33% of suggested Shorts is this AI-generated content. This isn't a wave of creative innovation; it's a flood of digital filler, and it's radically reshaping the platform's ecosystem and economy.
How We Know: Simulating the "New User" Experience
To cut through the personalization that defines older accounts, the Kapwing team took a straightforward, manual approach. They simulated the experience of a completely new YouTube user and manually evaluated the first 500 Shorts suggested by the platform's algorithm.
This ground-level view was combined with a macro analysis of the top 100 trending channels per country. Using third-party analytics tools like Social Blade to estimate subscriber growth and revenue, a clear picture emerged of who—or what—is currently winning the attention game. You can read their full methodology and findings in the Kapwing AI Slop Report.
The Profit Behind the Digital Trash
The most staggering takeaway is the sheer financial success of these channels, which stands in stark contrast to the minimal creative effort involved. While a professional creator might spend weeks on research, filming, and post-production for a single video, "sloppers" dominate through sheer, automated volume.
In India, the channel "Bandar Apna Dost" (Monkey Friend) leads the pack. It posts surreal, AI-generated clips of monkeys in bizarre situations and has raked in over 2.4 billion views. Kapwing's analysis estimates its annual revenue at a jaw-dropping $4.25 million.
In the USA, the channel "Cuentos Fascinantes" has become the world's most-subscribed slop channel with nearly 6 million followers. Overall, the top trending AI slop channels in the US have already amassed a collective 3.39 billion views.
These earnings are estimates, of course, based on publicly available CPM (cost per thousand views) data. Platforms like Social Blade provide these insights, and you can learn more about how estimated earnings are calculated here. The point is clear: there is serious money in mass-producing algorithmic attention bait.
YouTube's Inescapable Dilemma
This trend places YouTube in a notoriously difficult position. On one hand, Google and YouTube are championing generative AI as the next great frontier of creative tools and innovation. On the other, the platform's lifeblood—advertisers—may flee if their brand commercials are consistently placed next to nonsensical, low-quality filler.
The risk is a fundamental erosion of trust. As the digital space becomes increasingly saturated with AI slop, users may find it harder than ever to locate genuine, valuable content in the noise. The very algorithmic efficiency that powers YouTube's growth threatens to suffocate human creativity if automated clutter permanently drowns it out.
A Path Forward: AI as a Brush, Not the Painter
It's crucial to note that not all AI use is low-effort slop. The tool itself is neutral. A new class of creators is proving that AI can be a powerful component in high-quality, imaginative production when wielded with human vision, ethics, and creative intent.
The challenge for platforms, creators, and audiences will be to differentiate between content that uses AI to enhance a human story and content that exists solely because an AI made it possible to generate 100 videos an hour. The battle for the soul of digital creation isn't against the technology, but against the temptation to replace creativity with scale, and value with mere volume.