AI content has reached pretty much every social media platform by now and it's hard to avoid. In his yearly update-post, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced new plans.
AI-generated content on YouTube is nothing new. According to a recent article by Dexerto, over 20% of content on YouTube is now AI-generated. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan's plans for 2026 now show the direction this trend could take.
The Future Of AI Content On YouTube
In his yearly report, as well as an official video about his 2026 plans, Mohan addresses AI generated content on YouTube a lot. Even though he does talk about so called "AI slop", he also wants to support other uses of AI on his platform in 2026. In the video he states:
The goal there is very simple, which is to really use AI to empower the amazing human creativity that happens on YouTube every single day.
Accordingly, YouTube wants to promote tools that help creators. He mentions, for example, the possibility that in the future, channel owners could use AI to generate and share YouTube Shorts of themselves. In doing so, he also clearly emphasizes YouTube's guidelines. Creators should be able to create these videos themselves, no one else, it seems. This could help limit the countless AI videos of famous people.
What About "AI Slop"?
The term “AI slop” has become established in relation to AI videos that are not of high quality and are usually produced and shared so quickly that the process becomes spam-like. According to Mohan, YouTube wants to take direct action against this content. He emphasizes:
There, we want to make sure that out recommendation systems can deal with it. And we're going to treat it based on our track record of being able to do that around things like clickbait, you know, low quality, repetitive content.
Therefore, we can only hope that videos that belong into the "slop" category will actually be promoted less.
The Users Are Unhappy
This double-sided decision regarding AI has not been well received by most people who watched the video. Many comments criticize the CEO's decision to support AI so strongly, as according to the comments, neither the creators themselves nor the viewers are interested in using AI tools and consuming the corresponding content.
But now: What do you think? Is AI becoming too much, or do you think its full potential isn't there yet? Let us know in the comments!