Amidst The Market Panic About "AI Slop", YouTube Is Playing Chess
Why the platform economics of YouTube's AI strategy are working while Meta dishes out $100M payout in desperation
Yesterday, YouTube announced that next week (July 15), it will be updating its Partner Program guidelines “to better identify mass-produced and repetitious content.” This “minor update”—as YouTube Head of Editorial & Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie explains below—better reflects what “inauthentic” content—or “spam”—looks like today.
This is another perfect example of the market signals hiding behind obvious headlines. While everyone debates AI quality, YouTube is executing a sophisticated strategy to protect high-value content while using AI to compete in lower-margin formats.
Last week, “Baby Mistakenly Flies Plane”—a fully AI-generated video— was reportedly the 3rd most-watched on the platform with ~130m views.
Both this video and this policy update remind me of a conversation I had with YouTube creator Samir Chaudry of “Colin & Samir” last February for my Medium Shift column in The Information. He shared that he and his co-founder Colin Rosenblum worry that “inauthentic, AI-generated storytelling” will win at the expense of human-created content.
Rosenblum shared a similar fear to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan back in October 2023: Audiences will develop “an appetite” for AI-generated content “and it starts to change what it means for viewers to enjoy the platform and what it means for creators to succeed on the platform.”
He said he is less worried about flooding than he was in October because “it is in our DNA to tell stories and to hear stories told” by human storytellers. Over time, he said, YouTube’s algorithms will recognize that viewers prefer human-generated content.
YouTube is protecting the long-form arm of its business—which is increasingly capturing household TV time in the U.S., according to Nielsen’s The Gauge—by pushing AI in the short-form arm. This isn't accidental. It's calculated platform economics and competitive positioning.
YouTube Plays Both Sides
Over the past year-and-a-half, both Google and YouTube have been offering a growing suite of AI tools for content creators. In doing so, they have been playing both sides of the field of “AI slop” .
Three past essays related on this topic:
