AI Slop and the End of the 'Human' Internet

**Colin** (0:00)
This is an Indian YouTube channel called Bunder Apna Dost.

**Samir** (0:03)
Our subscriber.

**Colin** (0:04)
They started uploading about six months ago, and all the videos are fully generated by AI. They're all comedic and they sent around this monkey living in a human world. Now, this channel has gained three million subscribers in the past six months, and there's real viewership. It's done two billion views. There's reports of this channel making really good money.

**Samir** (0:23)
And this type of channel is everywhere. Now, it's what people are calling slug.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:28)
They're a type of artificially generated content that is flooding social media.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:32)
Enter the age of AI-generated infinite slop.

**Colin** (0:37)
Now, AI didn't invent slop. Slop has been around forever. It's fast content that's made for the masses. But AI makes the production of slop exponential.

**Samir** (0:46)
And the problem with slop is that it's contributing to the even greater problem that we're seeing on the internet right now. Abundance. There's too much stuff.

**Colin** (0:54)
To put some numbers to that, there are 95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram every day. There are 23 million TikToks uploaded every day, and 20 million videos uploaded to YouTube every single day. And one of the main problems with this abundance is that a lot of the content is good. There's good content everywhere. It's on every screen, and it's not just made by humans. It's also made by AI. And all this content is only getting better every day.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:23)
The so-called AI slop is getting less sloppy.

**SPEAKER_7** (1:26)
It is becoming harder and harder to discern which is which.

**SPEAKER_8** (1:30)
The new Sora, it seems designed to make videos that look believable.

**Samir** (1:34)
And this wave of content that we're seeing every day is what we've been calling the abundance era. This point where the supply for content has gone so far beyond the actual demand. So much so that it's hard for any creator to actually stand out or any one thing to truly feel like a moment, to feel significant.

**Colin** (1:55)
I truly believe that abundance is the biggest threat to the individual creator right now. So I think it's really important for us to talk about what's going on in our feeds right now and how you defend against this. How do you survive as a creator through the abundance era?

**Samir** (2:10)
So today on the show, we're going to be breaking down this major shift that's taking place on the Internet. It's basically like a Slop survival guide.

**Colin** (2:17)
Yeah. Yeah. It's a whole episode about AI Slop. If you have thoughts on it, which you probably already do, you're probably already pissed a little bit about this episode.

**Samir** (2:24)
Or maybe a lot of it.

**Colin** (2:25)
Or maybe a lot of it. Fair. It's a weird time. But feel free to comment now with some feelings, thoughts, get it out, and then be open to the discussion. I don't know why I'm so mad. I'm mad. Okay, so there was this new study done that shows that 20% of a new YouTube user's shorts feed is AI slop. This company basically started a bunch of new YouTube accounts, and this is what they report. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's what they report. But that means that 80% of the other content is human-made. And so this number that we said about YouTube, of 20 million videos posted every day, which is a number published by YouTube, that's an overwhelming amount of human-made content as well. So it's important to recognize that in the Abundance Era, there's both things are happening at the same time. We've also over the past 10 years had a rise in good quality human creators, like just people who know how to make good videos.

**Samir** (3:25)
Yeah, for me, it starts with COVID, where all of a sudden people have all of this available time to watch content. Hollywood's not able to produce like it used to. So the demand is really high and the supply is actually low. And creators came in to fill that demand. The ad dollars moved to creators, and all of a sudden we had all of these individuals who became established, professional creators. And it became very aspirational to be a creator. And that drove a lot of other people to want to be creators. I don't think there's like a single industry today that isn't touched by the creator economy.

**Colin** (3:59)
So now six years later, we are at a point in the creator economy where every niche is very saturated. And a lot of that also has to do, to be honest, with the fact that copying or replicating content in the creator economy has little to no consequence. So if you go on YouTube, you're going to see hundreds of variations of the same video, and they all work.