“AI Slop” Takes Over YouTube And Music Streaming Platforms Amidst Ethical Debate On Content Creation

“AI slop” content is flooding YouTube, and “AI slop” music is overtaking automated playlists while algorithms are increasingly promoting the “slop” content, according to users. AI slop is low-quality content generated by generative AI models. New research found 21-33% of YouTube’s algorithmic feed is comprised of AI slop or brain-rot videos, which are defined as low-quality, hyper-stimulating content with little value.

278 of the 15,000 most popular YouTube channels surveyed by Kapwing contained only AI-generated content. These channels have a combined 63 billion views, 221 million subscribers, and earn about $117 million in revenue each year. Researchers created a new YouTube account, and more than 20% of the first 500 recommended videos were AI-generated “slop,” and one-third were brainrot.

The global creator economy was over $200 billion in 2024 and is expected to balloon to over $1.1 trillion by 2032. The rapid adoption of generative AI for content creation comes as large companies like Amazon and UPS have laid off tens of thousands of employees due to AI and automation. A year-end report finds that 1.17 million jobs were cut in the US this year, the largest number since the COVID-19 pandemic led to 2.2 million layoffs. 55,000 of the layoffs in 2025 were attributed to AI advancements. 162 million people in the US identify as content creators, with 45 million being professionals. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues that AI resources are “cognitive enhancement tools,” and using the word “slop” to describe creations from AI dismisses the “sophistication” of the rapidly advancing technology. “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other,” Nadella wrote. “This is the product design question we need to debate and answer.”

Research has shown that reliance on large language models like ChatGPT and Grok has detrimental effects on cognition. Students who utilized Chat GPT to help them write an essay had lower brain engagement during the activity and couldn’t remember what they wrote minutes later. In another experiment, coders were found to be more productive when utilizing AI tools, but lost creative and critical thinking skills in the process.

Diminished cognitive abilities were also noted in a 2011 study, with increasing reliance on search engines like Google for information. Researchers found that people were much less likely to recall specific information, but enhanced recall for how to locate the information online. The researchers said the Internet became a “primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

AI is being utilized in a wide array of tasks across a vast array of job fields, from creative jobs to jobs that require analytical or logical reasoning. Elon Musk has said that people will only have jobs in the future as a hobby, not out of necessity. The Psychology Today blog suggests diminishing cognition from the use of AI tools falls back on the old phrase – “use it or lose it.” This is a concept that you will lose the skills you once had over the course of time if you don’t actively continue to use those skills.

A recent analysis found that 37% of all global internet traffic in 2024 was attributable to bots, an increase of 12% over the previous year. Just as bots can take over social media comment sections, they are now taking a larger share of the content creation market, from YouTube videos to music.

YouTube Music listeners are increasingly noticing that AI music is being played in the automated playlist algorithms. It has become easier for AI music to flood various platforms because there are AI music generators that can quickly spit out songs with just a few parameters filled out. There is a moral and ethical debate as part of this creation, because these generators create their music based on the musical body of work that has been created by humans.

An op-ed in the Atlantic last month said Suno, one of the most popular AI music generators, is arguably a “plagiarism machine” since the generator is trained upon a large body of historical recordings from human artists. In addition to those human artists, those recordings required recording, mixing, mastering, and marketing to get those songs into the ears of listeners.

A copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Suno in 2024 is ongoing, and the company argues the outputs are new sounds and inputs are protected by fair use laws. An open letter in 2024 calling for AI developers to “cease the use of AI to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists” was signed by over 200 musical artists, including Aerosmith, Stevie Wonder, and Nicki Minaj. The letter states, “Unchecked – AI will set in motion a race to the bottom that will degrade the value of our work and prevent us from being fairly compensated for it.”

The letter notes that AI can help advance human creativity when used in the right way, but says some “predatory” developers are using the technology to “sabotage creativity.” In addition to using the artist’s work as the basis for creations of AI music, the developers are diluting the royalty pools that are paid out to artists. The signatories of the letter accuse developers of attempting to replace the work of human artists with “massive quantities” of AI sounds and images. The letter states that this is “catastrophic” for working musicians.

Velvet Sundown and Solomon Ray are examples of completely AI-generated music with crafted personas that have millions of listens on Spotify and other platforms. There is also a wave of artists who create music with heavy assistance from AI tools that have debuted on the Billboard charts. These songs have been confirmed to be AI-assisted through Deezer’s AI Detection tool or by the artists themselves, who admit to using AI.