YouTube’s algorithm is on an AI slop and brainrot only diet

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If you’ve ever opened YouTube and seen a talking AI SpongeBob, a looping slime video, or something that feels engineered to melt your brain just enough to keep you scrolling, congrats. 

According to a new study from Kapwing, you’re not imagining things. The slop is real, and it’s everywhere.

Kapwing’s researchers created a brand-new YouTube account and watched what the algorithm served up to a fresh, untainted user.

They tracked the first 500 recommended videos. The results were bleak. About 21 percent were labeled AI slop, low-quality, AI-generated videos designed purely to rack up views. 

Another 33 percent fell into the broader category of “brainrot,” meaning bizarre, repetitive, hypnotic content that’s weirdly watchable but ultimately empty.

And this isn’t just a handful of strange videos sneaking through the cracks. 

Kapwing also looked at trending channels around the world and found 278 channels made entirely of AI slop sitting inside global top-100 rankings. 

These channels aren’t niche curiosities. They’ve pulled in billions of views, millions of subscribers, and an estimated tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue.

Spain, of all places, leads the pack, with AI slop channels boasting more than 20 million combined subscribers, beating out both the US and Brazil. 

South Korea’s slop economy has racked up more than 8.45 billion views, while India hosts individual AI slop channels that have crossed the 2-billion-view mark. 

Slop, it turns out, is fluent in every language.

Why is this spreading so fast? Because the system rewards it. 

AI videos are cheap, fast, endlessly scalable, and perfectly tuned to trigger curiosity. 

For new users, the algorithm has no history to guide it, so it defaults to whatever keeps eyeballs glued to the screen.

That’s a problem, especially when researchers at Amazon Web Services estimate that 57 percent of the internet may already be AI sludge. 

Some platforms are pushing back: DuckDuckGo offers filters for low-quality AI content, and TikTok gives users more control over recommendations.