Parmy Olson, Columnist

YouTube’s AI Slop Is a Win for Alphabet. But What About Us?

Sloppification looks set to help the video-sharing site become the world’s largest media company.

July 25, 2025 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

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There’s a prevailing wisdom that AI-generated content, or slop as it’s colloquially known, should make our skin crawl. AI models tend to generate uncanny faces, mangled hands and fantastical scenarios. Take this YouTube Short video of a baby that finds itself being shimmied up a baggage loader onto a jumbo jet, before donning an aviation headset and flying the plane. It has racked up more than 103 million views.

So too have other AI-generated videos which are starting to dominate the platform in much the same way they’ve proliferated across Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Several of YouTube’s most popular channels now feature AI-generated content heavily.