Most of TikTok Is Now AI Slop, and the Kids Are Getting It First

If TikTok has felt like a firehose of uncanny, low-effort video lately, you are not imagining it. Per 9to5Mac, close to 60% of TikTok videos are now AI slop, against roughly 21% on YouTube, and the platform is funneling the worst of it to the people least equipped to handle it.

The figure comes from a report by the editing platform Kapwing, which clocked nearly 60% of the clips served to brand-new accounts and to children as AI-generated. Newcomers and kids get the strongest dose, and that is less malice than math. The recommendation engine knows nothing about you yet, so it reaches for whatever is cheapest and most engagement-optimized, which right now means synthetic.

What it does to the youngest users

For young viewers it goes well past annoying. Writing in Mother Jones, researchers called it toddler-grade AI misinformation produced at industrial scale, and flagged the obvious risk to a developing brain that cannot yet tell a real explanation from a confident fake.

The scale is absurd on the company's own numbers. The Guardian reports that TikTok admits to hosting more than a billion AI videos, and has only just started testing a setting that would let you see fewer of them.

Notice that the off switch is arriving as a new, optional feature rather than the default. That tells you who the current setup is built for. Synthetic video is cheap to make and cheap to push, it keeps the feed moving, and the work of sorting real from fake gets quietly billed to the viewer, kids included.

TikTok is not uniquely villainous here. Every feed-based platform is drifting the same way as generating content gets cheaper than making it. But TikTok is the cleanest example yet of a feed where the slop is not a glitch. For a lot of users, especially the new and the young, the slop is the product.