Future YouTubers, heed this warning: Don’t freak people out with your slop. YouTube recently clarified its policies on what it considers to be “inauthentic content,” effectively cracking down on the low-effort, highly upsetting kinds of AI slop that have come to populate the platform more than anyone would like to admit.
In a video uploaded by Creator Insider, the company’s official channel for creator-related updates, YouTube’s vice president of trust and safety, Matt Halprin, provided a deep dive into how YouTube is handling AI-generated content—though the company seems to want to avoid that label for it. Instead, it breaks it down into three buckets: generic and repetitive, “off-putting” and emotionally manipulative, and AI personas. All three are currently redlined by the company, preventing them from monetizing under YouTube Partner Policy rules.
YouTube has technically had restrictions on this type of content since last year, when it started to attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube after allowing AI to run wild across its platform. Back then, the company laid out the groundwork for cracking down on “inauthentic content,” specifically targeting accounts churning out “mass-produced and repetitious” videos.
Now the company is adding some nuance to those restrictions, though it really would not like to completely cut off AI as an option for creators. “AI can actually allow people to make a lot of videos. Sometimes those videos are great, and it really enhances creativity. And you can create a higher volume of high-quality content that we want to encourage,” Halprin said during his appearance on Creator Insider. “But that exact same new tool can allow you to make lots of videos really quickly that are very similar. They’re very generic and don’t really have a narrative arc and don’t really show your creativity. So the same technology really enables great stuff, but it also enables stuff that’s kind of content farming, and that’s the stuff that we don’t want.”
Basically, the company has drawn the line at obvious slop, but is leaving the door open for AI-produced content that meets an unspoken quality metric. The company is also taking aim at “upsetting” content, which is another extremely fine line it’s trying to walk. It’ll likely cause issues for channels that discuss the news. Halprin used an example of a channel that shows videos of animals in distress as part of rescue missions, saying that if the core of the video is the distressing aspect, then that’s probably not going to be eligible for monetization.
The biggest issue, though, is slop—whether YouTube wants to name it or not. A recent study found that about 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm serves to new users are low-effort, AI-generated content. It’s even worse on Shorts, the company’s short-form, vertical video format, where as many as one in every two videos is AI-created. The company has reportedly started purging the worst offenders, but it’s a real Whac-A-Mole situation, made worse by the fact that the company itself seems to be investing in generative AI.