Spotify, YouTube, TikTok Move to Purge AI 'Slop' From Feeds

Spotify removed 75 million bulk uploads, duplicate songs and other "spammy" tracks last year, according to reporting in the New York Times. YouTube wiped 130,000 low-quality channels off the platform over a six-month stretch. LinkedIn, in a July statement, said "AI slop is a top priority for all of us" and shipped a button so users could report it.

The tally, also carried by The Star, reads like tech incumbents rooting out junk their own generative tools helped create. Nearly half of tracks uploaded daily to Deezer are AI-generated. AI accounts for more than a third of uploads on Apple Music. Over 20% of the first YouTube Shorts shown to new users are AI slop. On X, per Pangram data cited in the story, nearly half of posts exceeding 50 words were AI-created.

"Managing AI slop was a top priority this year," said Neal Mohan, YouTube's CEO. The company suspended one popular slop channel that had been earning about $4.25 million a year.

TikTok says it has labeled more than 3 billion AI-generated videos and removed 377,000 in the first three months of the year for AI policy violations. Substack, whose CEO Chris Best said "it's getting harder to tell what's real on the internet," has launched an AI detection tool built on Pangram. Meta rolled out an image generator that pulled from public accounts as reference material, then pulled the feature after three days.

"AI slop is a double-edged sword," said Paul Shovlin, an AI expert at Ohio University. Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the source. Merriam-Webster picked "slop" as its 2025 word of the year.