AI slop in your feed

The video-editing company Kapwing studied what a brand-new YouTube account sees. Its December 2025 study, reported by The Decoder, found that about 21% of the Shorts shown to a new account were AI-generated "slop", and that the top ten slop channels earned an estimated $33.6 million a year. It means low-quality AI video is already a business.

On the web

The analytics firm Graphite looked at 65,000 web articles and found that, since November 2024, AI-written articles are about as common online as human-written ones. Axios covered it. I could not open the Axios page while preparing this post, so check the original study if you plan to cite the number.

An election deepfake

In Ireland's 2025 presidential campaign, a fake "RTÉ News" video showed the frontrunner, Catherine Connolly, announcing that she was withdrawing from the race. It was shared roughly 30,000 times, two days before the vote. Engadget reported that Meta removed it.

Feeds made only of AI

Meta launched Vibes, a feed that shows only AI-generated videos, inside its Meta AI app. Users called it "infinite slop", as Notebookcheck reported.

Your attention is the product

Feeds are optimised to hold you, not to inform you. When content is cheap to produce, the supply is endless, so it matters even more to decide what you let in.

A five-step check before you share

Stop for ten seconds. Strong emotion is a warning sign.
Find the original outlet. Open the real site of the news organisation instead of trusting a screenshot.
Reverse-search the image with Google Lens or TinEye.
Look at the account. New, anonymous or posting every few minutes should raise suspicion.
Wait for a second source. If it is true, others will report it.

Sources

Part of the talk "The AI Era" by Faisal Adnan, Riphah International University, 6 November 2026.

Is That Real? Increasingly, No: AI Slop, Fake Articles and Election Deepfakes