YouTube’s AI Slop Is a Win for Alphabet. But Us?: Parmy Olson

There’s a prevailing wisdom that AI-generated content, or slop as it’s colloquially known, should make our skin crawl. AI models tend to generate uncanny faces, mangled hands and fantastical scenarios. Take this YouTube Short video of a baby that finds itself being shimmied up a baggage loader onto a jumbo jet, before donning an aviation headset and flying the plane. It has racked up more than 103 million views.

So too have other AI-generated videos which are starting to dominate the platform in much the same way they’ve proliferated across Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Several of YouTube’s most popular channels ...