About 59% of TikTok videos shown on a new account’s For You feed are due to AI, according to a Kapwing reportthe video creation tools company. That’s about three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube.
The company manually reviewed more than 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and conducted a separate new account test, counting AI-generated content in the top 500 For You videos.
How TikTok Compares to YouTube
Kapwing ran the same new account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the top 500 short films, or 21 percent, were AI garbage. On TikTok, 294 of the 500 For You videos reach this threshold.
I covered Kapwing’s YouTube findings and the broader issue of AI slope in March. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan also had named AI slop as a content quality issue, the company was building detection systems.
As of November, TikTok had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report.
Children’s content has the highest concentration
Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing examined in TikTok’s Kids category, 57% were AI slops. This is the highest rate of all categories analyzed.
The tag with the highest rate was #cartoonkidswhere 97 of the 100 videos presented were generated by AI. Tags like #cartoons And #babysong both reached 83%, and #forchildren arrived at 79%.
Which categories are most affected
After children, the highest AI drop rates were in science and education (35%), health (33%), and history (33%). In all three categories, visual illustration and voiceover narration make up a large portion of the content.
Conversely, categories in which presence in front of the camera or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates. Fashion stands at 1.3%, music at 1.5% and fitness at 1.6%.
How Kapwing collected the data
The report’s methodology started with a list of 20 popular TikTok categories and at least three of the most popular tags for each. The Kapwing team then manually checked the videos featured on each tag’s page, counting AI content versus non-AI content and combining the results by category. This produced the category-level percentages from a pool of 10,742 videos.
For testing new users, the team created a new TikTok account and scrolled through 500 For You videos, saving which ones were AI slops. The 59% figure comes from this single account test.
The report defines AI slop as videos with obvious AI-generated visuals, as well as low-quality compilations using clearly AI-generated scripts and voiceovers.
For the sake of transparency, Kapwing is a video editing and creation platform. The company has a commercial interest in measuring the gap between human-created and AI-generated content.
Why it matters
Brands producing TikTok content are entering a flow where automated content can trump human-created videos for new users. For content aimed specifically at children, the concentration is higher.
TikTok has added user controls for AI content, but data suggests that what new users see by default still leans heavily toward AI-generated videos.
Looking to the future
Kapwing has now released AI slop reports for YouTube and TikTok.
YouTube has responded to its slop problem with detection systems and monetization policy changes. TikTok added user-facing controls. It has not been measured whether these interventions change what new users actually see.
Featured image: FotoField/Shutterstock
