Snapchat joins YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack in fight against ‘AI slop’

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Online content volume has increased as the popularity of generative AI tools has risen, enabling users to create anything from essays to realistic videos.

Snap, which owns Snapchat, announced on Friday that the platform would stop recommending “wholly AI-generated videos” in its Spotlight feed, and would instead prioritise “authentic, human-made content.

YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack have announced similar strategies over the past two weeks.

Snap did not go so far as to announce it would stop all AI-generated content on its platform, which it still permits users to use. As a result, AI “enhanced or edited” content is still part of its recommendations to users.

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But the company did acknowledge that completely AI-generated content tends to be “low-quality”, “repetitive”, and not what Snapchat users typically want to see.

Recent studies into public perception of AI-generated videos show that people typically agree with those descriptions.

Furthermore, the more “AI slop” that people see in a social media feed, the less likely they are to believe that any content they’re seeing online is real, another study found.

Christ Best, co-founder and CEO of writing platform Substack, addressed the issue last week, saying, “It's getting harder to tell what's real on the internet."

Unveiling a new tool that allows readers to spot AI-generated writing, Best highlighted research that found 40% of writing on social media is now fake or AI-generated.

He added, "Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.”

LinkedIn, the social media platform designed for networking, announced a feature targeting the issue last week – allowing users to report a post or comment if it seems to be AI-generated.