YouTube’s AI slop crackdown has creators concerned, marketers cheering

YouTube global communications lead Nicole Bell told Digiday that the change was a “minor update,” pointing to a video by YouTube creator liaison Rene Ritchie claiming the policy update was not specifically aimed at AI-generated content. However, some YouTube creators have interpreted the move as a crackdown against AI-generated videos, since YouTubers who mass produce videos typically do so using AI tools. Since 2023, YouTube has required creators to disclose when their videos involve altered or synthetic content made with AI tools, with creators prompted to tag videos as such during the upload process.

“All channels do have to follow YouTube’s monetization policies, and creators are required to disclose when their realistic content is altered or synthetic, and that’s true regardless of how the content is created,” Ritchie said in the video.

But YouTube’s updated guidelines are open-ended and make it more difficult for creators who automate their video creation and posting to understand what is allowed, said YouTuber Bennett “Money Mind” Santora. Santora’s channel StoriezTold, for example, stitches together pre-existing videos to mass-produce original fictional stories about animals — thus straddling the line between original content and more repetitive narrated stories.

“More and more people have been complaining about people like myself making money from videos that are debatable whether or not they’re transformative, or whether or not they’re actually adding anything,” said Santora, whose channels have not yet been affected by YouTube’s updated guidelines. “So, I do think it’s a real risk.”

“Every single video that we post is a different story of a different animal, but it might still consider these repetitious content despite that,” Santora said in a video lamenting YouTube’s automated content crackdown. “I think, realistically, it’s going to consider it more repetitious content.”

Marketers, at least, are unfazed by YouTube’s new guidelines. Although advertisers’ interest in faceless creators — many of whom use AI tools to automate the mass-production of videos — is increasing, the majority of marketers’ spending on branded YouTube content goes to long-form creators who put their faces and personalities front and center and post relatively infrequently compared to the videos blasted out by faceless creators. Santora, for example, makes most of his YouTube income through affiliate links and the platform’s advertising revenue share, rather than direct sponsorships for branded content. He did not provide exact revenue figures.

“We’re obviously always happy to see these kinds of steps being taken. I wonder about any potential impact on CPMs if all this ‘slop’ had potentially held down costs on the platform; while they have mechanisms in place to keep that content from being monetized, I find it hard to believe it caught everything,” said Jeremy Whitt, executive media director at Hanson Dodge. “But overall, I don’t anticipate much direct impact on how appealing YouTube is to our clients. I think adherence to/enforcement of these new guidelines will be important to watch, especially as AI content gets better and harder to identify.”

And despite the potential crackdown, both creators and marketers broadly view YouTube’s updated policies as a positive move. They believe it indicates that the platform is paying attention to the ways creators are using AI — and that it’s open to AI tools that don’t result in the propagation of so-called “AI slop” videos. 

“I don’t think the update will kill automated content entirely, but it will make the line clearer between what was barely monetizable and what no longer is — things like ranking videos or similar formats that were right on the edge of being considered transformative,” said creator Khrystyian Danylenko, who said that his YouTube channel had recently been terminated amid an earlier crackdown against repetitive content. “The same goes for fully AI-generated content or reaction videos that reuse the exact same template or recording across all uploads.”

Although Danylenko said he viewed YouTube’s crackdown as “a bit harsh,” flagging the decision to terminate his channel rather than demonetizing it as an example, he said that he understood YouTube’s reasoning and believed creators would be pushed to publish more original content as a result of the change.

“Once those types of channels stop being monetized, that kind of low-effort content will gradually disappear, and viewers will shift toward content that actually adds value,” he said.

YouTube’s updated content guidelines also coincide with the rise of AI-generated ads across both YouTube and other platforms, which have raised concerns in some corners for potentially misleading consumers about products and the individuals endorsing them. Jonathan Meyers, CTO of the creator marketing platform Agentio, which sometimes uses AI to make tweaks to its video ads, said that his company viewed the policy updates as a positive change because they will encourage influencer marketers to use AI to refine human-centric videos, rather than using the technology to produce entirely synthetic creator ads from the ground up.

“To me, it’s just indicative of where we are in the adoption curve, heading towards the trough of disillusionment with some of these AI content tools and understanding what people value,” he said.

The glut of mass-produced AI-generated content on YouTube is a natural outcome of the platform’s relatively open-ended approach to AI tools over the past year. Previously, YouTube treated AI like any other creation tool, but did not have any specific policies around the mass-publication of AI-generated videos. YouTube did not say how many channels had been shut down due to the policy change.

“The number of channels being terminated is kind of insane,” Danylenko said. “But honestly, this is just part of the grind.”