AI slop
Also called: slop
Slop describes generated work made at volume with no editorial judgement: narrated stock footage, recycled listicles, synthetic music channels, invented history clips. The economics created it, since generating a video costs almost nothing and only a fraction of the batch needs to earn for the batch to pay.
YouTube has moved on it from the monetisation side. In July 2025 it renamed its repetitive content policy to inauthentic content. The company framed that as a clarification: mass-produced and repetitive work had never been eligible for monetisation. Its January 2026 CEO letter then committed to suppressing low-quality mass-produced material using the existing spam and clickbait systems. Using AI in a workflow was never the trigger. Volume with nobody making decisions is.