TikTok ‘For You’ Feed Dominated by AI Content, Report Finds

Image credit: Search Engine Journal

TikTok’s “For You” feed for new users contains significantly more AI-generated content than YouTube, raising concerns about content quality, especially for children, according to a recent report by Kapwing.

The study found that 59 percent of videos served to a new TikTok account’s “For You” feed consisted of AI-generated “slop,” a rate approximately three times higher than YouTube, where 21 percent of the first 500 Shorts were identified as AI slop in a similar test.

Children’s content on TikTok exhibited the highest concentration of AI slop, with 57 percent of videos in the “Kids” category being AI-generated, Kapwing reported. Specific tags such as #cartoonkids showed an even higher prevalence, reaching 97 percent.

Other content categories with substantial rates of AI-generated material included Science and Education at 35 percent, Health at 33 percent, and History, also at 33 percent.

Conversely, categories requiring an on-camera presence or physical demonstration, such as Fashion, Music, and Fitness, displayed the lowest rates of AI slop, at 1.3 percent, 1.5 percent, and 1.6 percent respectively.

TikTok had labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated by November, indicating the platform’s acknowledgment of the issue. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan also recognized AI slop as a significant content quality concern for his platform.

The report by Kapwing, a video editing software company, analyzed content served to newly created accounts to assess the initial user experience and the prevalence of AI-generated videos across both major platforms.

Source: Search Engine Journal