According to research, more than 20 percent of videos posted on YouTube are low-quality, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content. There are only channels on the platform that upload such videos, have millions of subscribers and billions of views.
Employees of the video editing company Kapwing conducted a study on this topic. They created a new YouTube account from scratch and analyzed the first 500 videos they came across in the Shorts feed. As a result, 104 videos (21 percent) were rated as low-quality AI content, and 165 videos (33 percent) as “brain rot” content.
In addition, the researchers collected information only on large channels that produce AI videos. The country where such channels gained the most subscribers was Spain — 22.2 million subscribers. South Korea is in the lead in terms of the number of views — 8.45 billion views. The channel with the most views individually was Bandar Apna Dost from India — 2.07 billion views. The report notes that the channel's annual revenue exceeds $4.2 million.
Experts say it's easy for new users to quickly become exposed to low-quality AI content. It's not yet clear whether this is because YouTube's algorithms favor such videos or because they're simply viewed too often.
