Snapchat joins other popular platforms in fight against 'AI slop'

Snapchat has joined the likes of YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack in a growing effort to combat fake writing, images and videos that are entirely created by artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Such content, commonly called "AI slop", has proliferated online as the tech industry has raced to create a greater number of easier to use generative AI tools that can create anything from essays to realistic videos.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, said on Friday that the platform would stop recommending "wholly AI-generated videos" in its popular Spotlight feed in favour of "authentic, human-made content."

Over the past two weeks, YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack have unveiled similar strategies.

Snap did not go so far as to try and prohibit all AI-generated content from Snapchat. The platform offers its own AI tools to alter content, and so AI "enhanced or edited" content will still be part of its recommendations to users.

However, Snap acknowledged that entirely AI-generated content is typically "low-quality", "repetitive", and generally not what Snapchat users want to see.

Recent research into the reception of AI-generated content shows that people tend to agree with those descriptions.

Moreover, the more fake AI-generated content that people see in a social media feed, the less likely they are to think that any of the content they're being shown online is genuine, according to a separate survey.

As Chris Best, the co-founder and chief executive of Substack put it last week: "It's getting harder to tell what's real on the internet."

Announcing a new tool designed to let readers on the newsletter platform detect AI-generated writing, Best cited other research that has found up to 40% of writing on social media is now fake or AI-generated.

"Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom," Best said.

LinkedIn, a social media platform focused on work, introduced a button on its platform this week that allows any user to report if a post or a comment appears to be AI-generated.

"AI slop is a top priority for all of us," LinkedIn's chief product officer Hari Srinivasan wrote on the platform.

In just the last couple of months, he said the platform had "blocked billions" of attempts to post AI-generated comments.

"Every day we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts," Srinivasan said.

Like Snap, LinkedIn said it is not rejecting the use of AI entirely and users that use AI tools to "refine" their posts should not get caught up in efforts to combat AI slop.

Nonetheless, LinkedIn is removing an automated prompt that would show up for users writing a post offering to "enhance" it through the use of AI. It will go back to a simple proofreading tool.

YouTube, the video platform owned by Google, also this month updated its policies around what kind of content can be monetised by creators.

Research from last year found scores of channels on YouTube that were solely AI-generated content, many of which had millions of subscribers and some of which made millions of dollars in revenue.

In an effort to discourage YouTube from filling up with what the platform calls "inauthentic content", earlier this month the site broke down into three categories the kind of videos that will not be allowed to make money through it: generic, repetitive, or template-based.

Those styles of content are much easier to make, and quickly, with the use of generative AI tools.

YouTube's trust and safety chief Matt Halprin said in an interview on the updated rules that, while AI tools can help people with their content, they are more frequently being used to create fake and low-quality videos.

"The same technology really enables great stuff," Halprin said.

"But it also enables stuff that's kind of content farming, and that's the stuff that we don't want to have."