YouTubers are worried about AI for the wrong reasons
There has always been slop, but generative AI threatens something else entirely
Yesterday, I wrote about why I think that changes to the YouTube recommendation algorithm in 2023 have made this a uniquely good time to start a YouTube channel. One response I got when discussing the post with people offline goes something like this:
“What about AI-generated video slop? Veo 3 came out in May 2025, Sora 2 just came in in September 2025. With so much more AI slop getting uploaded to YouTube every day, isn’t now a uniquely bad time time to try and break in?”
I’m not particularly worried about the genre of slop that people are worried about. That’s not to say that “YouTubers shouldn’t be worried.” There are certainly some YouTube creators who should be worried, but this is for reasons that are entirely unrelated to “AI-generated content flooding the platform.”
That being said, AI-generated slop does threaten one type of content: human-generated slop.
YouTube has always been full of slop
Have you ever heard of a channel called “5-Minute Crafts?” If not, I apologize for being the one to present you with the knowledge of this cursed media brand:
This Russian-owned channel is the epitome of mass-produced “engaging content,” where short wordless clips of “life hacks” show you how to glue a fork to a shoe, paint a banana, microwave crayons, or use shaving cream to clean your keyboard.
Many people truly do not comprehend the scale and volume of slop that existed on YouTube even prior to the advent of generative AI. YouTube has always been full of this.
But the existence of this content should not matter to you if you are running a YouTube channel where you talk about the engineering of the F-16 or review books by David Foster Wallace. The person who clicks on that slop is not part of your target audience. Those videos are not “your competition,” any more than Oreos are competition for a $50 steak. They exist in entirely different parts of the YouTube ecosystem.
(Obviously, this reassurance does not apply if you are a slop merchant. If you were in the business of making slop, then sorry, AI probably is going to take your job.)
Every so often there’s a published stat like “700,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day.” And frankly it doesn’t really matter if that number suddenly becomes 7 million because of AI-generated slop.
Even if the amount of crap uploaded to the platform increases a hundredfold, the content hosted on YouTube’s servers going from being 99.9% crap in 2020 to being 99.999% crap in 2025 is probably not going to change the underlying reality that there are plenty of people who want to watch good videos, and YouTube will (as it always has) figure out how to surface good videos to the people who want to watch them. (And, as it always has, it will continue serving slop to the people who are content to click on that garbage.)
AI videos beyond “Sora slop”
A more interesting point here is that there are a lot of videos on YouTube that are substantially AI-generated, but that demonstrate more effort than short clips from Sora. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about:
The “Sleepless Historian” channel is entirely AI: the thumbnails are AI generated, the videos themselves are AI generated; the early videos on the channel are the uncanny image of an AI-generated man in a suit delivering a 2-hour lecture in a single take while repeating the same hand gesture. And of course the scripts for these 2-hour videos are written by GPT:
From Visigothic kings and Islamic caliphates to imperial conquests and modern-day scandals, the Spanish monarchy has seen it all. This isn’t just the story of kings and queens—it’s the story of a nation constantly rewriting its identity through power, politics, and wars.
The AI-ness of this channel has gotten less obvious over time: the uncanny AI-generated lecturer is replaced now with a slideshow of AI-generated images in a faux-historical artstyle that doesn’t obviously scream to the lay viewer that “this was made in Midjourney.”
A million people watched this video. How many watched it without realizing it was AI? How many people don’t care that it was AI, because the video entertained them to the degree that they wanted it to? Remember, the RLHF’d versions of GPT write like this because users like it:
I think that it’s somewhat more reasonable for “actual YouTubers” to worry about this kind of AI generated content. If you’re the sort of person who makes 1-hour history lectures on YouTube, then it seems like this AI-generated video is actually competing for the same eyeballs that you are. And to a certain extent, it probably is!
And yet this, too, does not feel like a new problem that suddenly sprang into existence after the release of ChatGPT and Midjourney: YouTube has always been swimming in “educational” slop.
Edutainment slop
Before the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there were still a massive number of “educational channels” putting out 30-60 minute videos that are basically just reading Wikipedia articles, or plagiarizing documentaries.
Harris “Hbomberguy” Brewis made a 4-hour video about the problem of plagiarism on YouTube, talking about these types of “content mills,” which would often present misleading or outright incorrect information, because a lazily-researched video is easier to produce than a well-researched one (according to the literal definition of the word “lazy”). A large number of YouTuber viewers are not discerning enough to know or care about the difference until another high-profile YouTuber like hbomberguy points it out to them.
With that as our backdrop for what the pre-AI slop-filled YouTube ecosystem, ContraPoints makes an interesting observation:
So, once again, I will remark: this problem of YouTube being filled with low-effort slop is not new, even for “slop in the form of 30-minute videos masquerading as educational content.”
And, once again, I am forced to remark: if you are a “slop merchant,” then yes, the AI may be coming for your job, even if you you are the type of “slop merchant” whose main product is “fact-shaped statements, stated confidently, for an undiscerning audience of people who do not care about your sources and think that GPT-4o is the pinnacle of amazing prose.”
As someone who is launching an educational YouTube channel in a couple months, it is entirely possible that there may be some overlap between my audience and the audience of people who watch AI-generated history lectures on channels like Sleepless Historian. But if I wasn’t sharing the platform with Sleepless Historian in 2026, I would be sharing it with channels like iilluminaughtii in 2022.
My thesis is the same in either case: slop gets a lot of eyeballs, but there is an audience out there that genuinely does care about good writing. There are people who do care about good research on interesting and important topics with high-effort presentation. I’m part of that crowd, I watch a lot of well-researched videos that cater to people like me, and if people are willing to skip past the slop to find and watch higher-effort channels like PolyMatter and Wendover Productions, it seems reasonable to conclude that there will be an audience for the kinds of videos that I intend to make.
So, why should YouTubers be scared?
Earlier, I said something to the effect that Sora slop is competing with a well-made 30-minute video essay to roughly the same extent that Oreos are competing with a $50 steak: despite both being “video content” (or “food”), the two don’t really exist in the same product class.
And yet, there is sense in which “unlike” things can still compete, because everyone is chasing attention. In 2009, Paul Graham said “Facebook killed TV.” Netflix’s Reed Hastings said that “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.”
That is a salient worry for people in the YouTube ecosystem: you’re not just competing for eyeballs within the platform, you’re also competing with all the other apps on people’s phone, and that includes ChatGPT, which maybe the only app to surpass YouTube in user retention.
And then there’s the question of what needs an app is filling.
“The learning app”
A few years ago, the NYT published a story about how “For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine:
In one of my all-time favorite YouTube videos, Internet Shaquille reports on his experience making YouTube shorts. YouTube helpfully tells creators “these are the top things that people are searching for” (so that creators can supply the content that viewers are demanding), and Internet Shaquille reacts with utter astonishment at the new YT shorts audience:
When I look at my audience’s trending activity, it’s clear I have a new audience that goes about the world in ways I truly can’t grasp. Why would someone search “how to eat a chick-fil-a sandwich?”
Some olds like me think of TikTok as “the time suck app,” and a distraction from learning that should be banned from classrooms, but online culture journalist Taylor Lorenz argues that phones shouldn’t be banned from high school classrooms because of the pedagogical value of phone apps.
In September 2022, the NYT reported that TikTok was “the Google replacement” for Gen Z. And now, in 2025, it seems safe to say that ChatGPT is “the Google replacement” for Gen Z.
So in that sense, ChatGPT has replaced short form video platforms as “the learning app.” People no longer need to type “how to eat chick fil a sandwich” into the search bar on YouTube shorts or YouTube because they can type it into ChatGPT:
So, if you are the type of YouTuber who is uploading “how to eat a chick fil a sandwich.mp4,” you should be very scared about AI.
I jest, but this a point that is actually made a bit more artfully by YouTuber Dave Jeltema:
If you’re still doing tutorials or just sharing information, you’re being replaced. Right now, I can pull out my phone, talk to it like it’s a friend, and get a solution specific to my exact situation at 4:00 in the morning.
Knowledge isn’t scarce anymore. Information isn’t valuable just because it exists. So how do you stand out when knowledge isn’t scarce anymore? That’s what we need to figure out.
This is the genre of YouTuber that may be most threatened by the existence of ChatGPT, and this is a major consideration for me as I work on my own YouTube channel.
Knowledge is cheap. What do you have to offer?
I would like to make a video about Norman Borlaug and how his work in agriculture contributed to massive improvements in food production around the world. However, I cannot upload a YouTube video titled “Norman Borlaug and the history of the Green Revolution” in hopes that people will type “Norman Borlaug” into the YouTube search bar and find my video.
But that’s okay, because my audience is not actually “people who are looking for information about Norman Borlaug.” My audience is “people who would enjoy learning about Normal Borlaug, but don’t yet know it.” I need my audience to have a question, and for my Norman Borlaug content to be the answer to that question.
This is what the most successful channels on YouTube do. They give you a title and thumbnail that invite a question, and then say “allow me to spend the next 12 minutes giving you the answer to that question”:
Veritasium has done something quite special here. If you asked 100 million people, “hey, do you want to watch a 12-minute video about a technology that Los Angeles reservoir uses to prevent sunlight from triggering chemical reactions that might produce carcinogenic bromate?” they would probably say “no, that sounds boring.”
But with this title and thumbnail, Veritasium plants a question. You become aware of a gap in your knowledge: “wait, why are there 96 million black balls on this reservoir?” And, how convenient, your cursor is hovering right over a video that promises to answer that question. You can get the answer; all you have to do is click. And 100 million people did exactly that.
The trick of “using the title and thumbnail to inform the viewer of a gap in their knowledge, which you then offer to fill” can be done by asking a question, but you don’t need a question mark, as Veritasium again shows here:
There are not 40 million people going to the search bar and typing in “Thomas Midgley Jr.” But Veritasium was able to lead them to that video by coming up with a title and thumbnail that 40 million people wanted to click on.
This is much of the art of “being a YouTuber,” and why this is not just about “making videos.” To succeed on YouTube, they must cleverly “package” and present those videos to the world in a way that makes people want to click on them. (And then they have to ensure that the video actually delivers on the promises that they made with the packaging.)
Currently, this kind of “content strategy” is a domain where where skilled humans still beat state of the art AI models, so I stand by my assertion that 2025 is a uniquely good time to start a YouTube channel.
I write about YouTube. I also sometimes write about progress, like in this post about why farmers were afraid to fertilize their crops:
Pedantic but you seem to equate X million views = X million people watched it, which is unlikely to be true.
Thank you for linking that video, that was really interesting.