If you have ever felt like your TikTok feed is mostly fake content, you are not imagining it. A new report from Kapwing found that 59% of videos served to a brand-new TikTok account are AI slop. That is roughly three times the rate Kapwing found when it ran the same test on YouTube.
How bad is TikTok’s AI slop problem compared to YouTube?
Kapwing built a fresh account on both platforms and manually checked the first 500 videos served to each one. On TikTok, 294 of those videos were AI-generated. On YouTube, only 104 of the first 500 Shorts qualified as slop, putting that platform’s rate at 21%.
The scale of the problem is staggering when you consider that TikTok had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated by November. Kapwing also manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 different content categories to get a fuller picture of where slop tends to cluster.
Which TikTok categories are flooded with AI slop
Kids’ content topped every category, with 57% of the 2,000 videos turning out to be AI-generated. The worst single tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 out of 100 featured videos were artificial.
Science and Education, Health, and History followed close behind, each landing between 33% and 35% AI slop. These are categories where animation and voiceover narration tend to replace real demonstration.
On the other end, Fashion, Music, and Fitness were nearly untouched, each sitting below 2%, likely because those formats rely heavily on real, on-camera presence.
Even though TikTok has rolled out tools for users to dial back AI content in their feeds, this study suggests that what shows up by default still leans heavily towards AI. For now, the burden of filtering slop from substance largely falls on the viewer.
