More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.
The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.
Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.
The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.
The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.
Isn’t the whole point of peer to peer to automatically and transparently scale with the number of devices accessing the information?
If every viewer maintains a cache of the most recent videos it’s reproduced and shares them back, then the more interest there is in a video the more distributed it will be and the less load there’ll be on the original holster.
Seems to work fine for torrents (though needing to stream the chunks in a set order instead of randomly does add some inefficiency).
Of course you need a proper client to do that, can’t just use a browser (except maybe with an extension acting as the client), and I’ve got no idea if that’s how peertube works (if it doesn’t, the name is disingenuous and false advertising), but it’s how it should work, if it ever wants to be able to compete with googles datacentres.
As I understand it from an admittedly limited technical knowledge, it’s, yes, much like torenting video by getting the packets in order. So server capacity and the bandwidth of users hosting the video both need to be consistently high for anything to really go viral and not just crash servers. Basically, unless seeders are cultivated for popular videos, there’s always a low ceiling for any video before it maxes out it’s ability to be watched simultaneously.
it already works in browsers. other clients would need to implement it themselves. I have no idea if this is viable with battery powered devices on a data cap