If you ever thought that your TikTok feed is dominated by fake material, you’re not dreaming. A fresh report from Kapwing shows that 59% of the videos served to a brand‑new TikTok account are AI‑generated nonsense – roughly three times the proportion Kapwing recorded when it performed the same test on YouTube.
**How does TikTok’s AI‑slop issue stack up against YouTube’s?**
Kapwing created a new account on each platform and manually examined the first 500 videos each delivered. On TikTok, 294 of those clips were AI‑generated, while on YouTube only 104 of the first 500 Shorts qualified as AI slop, giving YouTube a 21% rate.
The magnitude of the problem becomes clearer when you note that TikTok had already labelled 1.3 billion videos as AI‑generated by November. Kapwing also manually inspected over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 content categories to map where the slop tends to cluster.
**Which TikTok categories are saturated with AI slop?**
Children’s content topped the list, with 57% of 2,000 videos identified as AI‑generated. The worst tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 out of 100 videos were artificial.
Science & Education, Health, and History followed closely, each showing 33‑35% AI slop – categories where animation and voice‑over often replace real‑world demonstration.
At the opposite end, Fashion, Music, and Fitness were almost untouched, each staying below 2%, likely because these formats rely heavily on genuine, on‑camera presence.
Even though TikTok has introduced tools for users to dial back AI content in their feeds, this study suggests that the default stream still leans heavily toward AI. For now, the task of sifting the slop from the substance largely falls on the viewer.