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

Image source, ReutersImage caption, Snapchat is trying to tamp down on AI-generated videos.

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, external with those descriptions.

Moreover, the more fake AI-generated content that people see in a social media feed, the less likely, external 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."

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.