We've all seen the absolutely diabolical garbage of the highest order that AI slop is on YouTube. It got me thinking how would you deal with it? As I understand it YouTube are cracking down on AI slop at least in regards to monetisation but is there more they can do? Yet at the same time it seems that YouTube is actively pushing AI features itself. Bit of a dilemma here.
It's a real dilemma. Not a big fan of AI vids, tbh. YouTube should aggressively label and demote low effort AI slop. Clearer rules for creators would help too. Someone just starting out with AI vids may think they're making really good stuff, but in actuality, compared to other creators, it's garbage. There's this one guy on X I follow. He makes 5–10 AI shorts and small sized videos almost daily. He's got a ton of followers and makes decent $$ on X. Why? If you really think about it, all he does is enter the right prompts and generate the videos. No effort whatsoever. He thinks he's amazing, though.
The barrier to entry is practically non-existant for video/text creation anymore so we get such slop. The people on X boasting how they make them obviously make it 100x worse. But really what are those people learning in terms of real skills? Nothing. The good thing about at least YouTube is the algorithm will tell you if your video is complete garbage by way of analytics. But these people just want to make a quick buck so they pump garbage and learn nothing. Definitely an interesting time.
You shouldn't worry too much about it. YouTube algorithms are constantly changing and often discard fully generated AI content. Concentrate on your audience and build from there
The dilemma mostly resolves once you accept YouTube can't reliably detect AI and isn't really trying to. What they can measure is retention per impression and whether a channel produces returning viewers. Slop tanks both, so it gets demoted whether a human or a model made it. Their July 2025 monetization update spelled this out: the wording was "mass-produced and repetitious," not "AI." I've watched channels that lean on AI heavily keep monetization fine because the videos still hold watch time and pull subscriber-driven sessions, while faceless slop farms got swept even when parts of their output were technically human-edited. The thing they punish is low-effort sameness, and AI just made that cheap to mass produce. That's also how they demote slop and ship AI tools in the same quarter without contradicting themselves. A creator using AI as a production assistant on a real channel identity still throws off the engagement signals they reward. A farm spinning up 200 auto-generated uploads doesn't, and no amount of AI polish saves a retention graph that drops off a cliff in the first fifteen seconds.