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Spend some time scrolling on social media these days and you are likely to notice more and more videos made with artificial intelligence. Many are funky or fantastical. Others are downright bizarre. Some are intentionally misleading.

Rapid advancements in AI have led to a proliferation across the internet of what critics are calling "AI slop," or short videos that are rapidly produced, often repetitive, and made using generative AI technology. Platforms are grappling with how to handle them.

Take those on the YouTube channel FUNTASTIC YT, which hosts dozens of videos in which an animated kitten has a brief, often nonsensical, misadventure. In one, the kitten sits by a backyard swimming pool full of rainbow goo. "Dad, can I swim in this slime pool?" the kitty asks.

His buff feline dad then appears in the pool neck deep, unable to escape. "No son, I'm stuck. Please help me," he says.

The video has all the hallmarks of being made using AI: It's got colorful, simplistic animation and computer voiceovers. Still, though it barely has a hint of a plot, it's funny, relatably goofy — and it's been seen over 2 million times.

In others, the kitten rides on a blimp made of pancakes, or a car made of cola, or swims in a giant pool of gummy bears while his usually exasperated dad looks on.

To some critics, videos like these are an annoyance that clutter up people's feeds, and fill the online landscape with low-effort or meaningless content.

"I don't think this video exists for any creative, any expressive, any informational or educational reason. It's purely to be engaged with," said Adam Bumas, with the tech-focused newsletter Garbage Day.

"AI is really superpowering spam," said Jason Koebler, a co-founder of the tech news website 404Media who has been following the rise of AI slop. "The whole point is to hit the algorithm in some way — to basically win the algorithmic lottery, get people to like, comment, share, and hopefully, go very viral."

But Mark Lawrence I Garilao, who created those kitten clips and the channel, sees it differently. Garilao said making AI videos is creative and fun — and a way to use a new technology.

Garilao is a 21-year-old college student who NPR reached by phone in the Philippines, where he studies computer science. He said he produces one or two clips a day, all with a similar theme revolving around the kitten and his father. Each takes one or two hours to produce, using 

 to create video, and other software to edit.

"When I think of the story or what the dialogue would be, I would just — I would just sit there and think of a random one, which I find funny. That's it," he said.

It's mostly for entertainment, he said. But there's also good money in it. YouTube owner Google pays channel owners through its AdSense program based on the number of people who watch the videos and see ads.

"The highest I made was in the month of May. I made $9,000 in just one month," Garilao said. For perspective, that adds up to more than a year's salary in the kind of entry-level job he said he can expect when he graduates.

Other channels churn out videos at a much higher rate, hoping to cash in on views.

Koebler, of 404Media, said the high volume of mass-produced AI slop is crushing other creators — like artists or photographers who work without AI — by diverting attention away from them.

"I think that discoverability on the internet has already started to collapse," he said. "I think it becomes really hard to stand out when the primary arbiter of whether something is seen or not is an engagement algorithm."

In some cases, AI slop can be more than an annoyance. Some of it is straight-up misinformation, like fake clips of celebrities rescuing people from the Texas floods in July. 

Other AI videos tap into trends. Garilao says his payday in May was supercharged because he added "Italian brainrot" meme characters to his cat videos. These are popular AI-generated characters, like Ballerina Cappuccina, a dancer with a coffee cup for a head, and Tralalero Tralala, a shark wearing Nike sneakers.

Social media platforms are recognizing the challenge of the onslaught of so much AI-generated content. But they aren't necessarily banning it outright.

TikTok and Instagram are now labeling certain AI-generated content. Meta says it allows AI-generated content that meets community standards, and lets users personalize their Facebook feed and shape their experience on Instagram to avoid things they don't want to see. TikTok says it has rules against AI deepfakes.

And YouTube recently tweaked one of its policies: It already barred people from making money off of "repetitive" content, and expanded that to the broader term "inauthentic" content.

YouTube says this was just a minor update, and directed NPR to 

 by the company's in-house "creator liaison" Rene Ritchie for details. "This is to clarify that the policy includes content that's mass produced or repetitive, which is content viewers often consider spam," Ritchie said in the video.

It's unclear what this change will mean in practice, though, according to Casey Fiesler, a professor at the University of Colorado who studies tech policy and ethics.

"There's nothing about this change that explicitly suggests that it's targeting AI-generated content," she said.

At the same time, YouTube is also encouraging video creators to use AI through features on its app that do things like create fake backgrounds.

Koebler, of 404Media, says he doesn't think social media platforms are really taking a hard stand against AI content, in part because they're all invested in it.

"I think that they think that maybe this stuff is annoying now, but in five years, they imagine a world where most content on the internet is generated by AI, but it's content that people are going to want to see," he said.

And in the meantime, Garilao says plenty of people 

want to see his AI videos. His channel has nearly 600,000 subscribers and his videos have collectively racked up nearly 500 million views.

Comments on his videos accusing him of producing AI slop used to bug him, he recalled: "At first I was like, 'Oh, man, why do they hate my content?'"

Now, he said, he gives those comments a heart emoji, and thanks people for their engagement. The more, the better.

Note: Google, which owns YouTube, and Meta are financial supporters of NPR.

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Critics say that “slop” videos made with generative AI are often repetitive or useless. But they get millions of views — and platforms are grappling with what to do about them.

‘AI slop’ videos may be annoying, but they’re racking up views — and ad money

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