TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds

"About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account's For You feed are AI slop," writes Search Engine Journal, "according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That's roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube."

The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, counting AI-generated content in the first 500 For You videos. Kapwing ran the same fresh-account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the first 500 Shorts, or 21%, were AI slop. On TikTok, 294 of 500 For You videos hit that threshold.

Kids Category Dominates AI Slop

Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed in TikTok's Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest rate of any category in the analysis. The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags like #cartoons and #babysong both reached 83%, and #forkids came in at 79%.

Categories with High AI Slop Rates

After Kids, the next highest AI slop rates were in:

• Science and Education (35%)
• Health (33%)
• History (33%)

All three are categories where visual illustration and voiceover narration make up much of the content.

Categories with Low AI Slop Rates

On the other end, categories where on-camera presence or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates:

• Fashion: 1.3%
• Music: 1.5%
• Fitness: 1.6%

The article notes that by last November, TikTok "had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report."