Meghan McCarty Carino

This week, YouTube CEO Neil Mohan published a letter laying out kind of the goals for the platform for 2026, which includes apparently cracking down on AI slop.

This has kind of become, you know, a big issue on all social media platforms.

AI content tends to generate a lot of engagement, whether I think people like it or not.

But the YouTube CEO said, you know, they're going to use these same kind of algorithmic filters that they use to flag spam and clickbait on YouTube to also flag AI slop.

This kind of seems actually like a pretty difficult challenge because it seems like a fine line between, you know, what is clickbait?

What is slop?

What is something negative for the platform?

And what is just people using AI to express their creativity?

Very low effort, like minimal effort.

Yeah, you just churn it out.

Yeah, the slop that really gets me, that makes me mad, is these sort of like funny animal videos that are not, it's not like the cat that's like doing, you know, wild humanistic stuff that you know that it's AI generated.

It's like, oh, the raccoons jumping on the trampoline or the, you know, just that kind of stuff where it's like, it depends on you believing that it's real for it to be at all interesting at all.

And my husband sends me a lot of these videos and I'm always like, this is AI.

This is AI.

It makes me so mad.

That was Paresh Devay at Wired.

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