TikTok has spent years perfecting the art of knowing exactly what you want to watch next. Open the app, scroll a few times, and suddenly it’s serving videos that feel uncannily tailored to your interests. But what happens before TikTok learns who you are? According to new research from video editing platform Kapwing, the answer is increasingly AI slop.
The study found that nearly 60% of the videos shown to a brand-new TikTok account were low-quality AI-generated content. That’s not a niche problem buried in obscure corners of the platform. It’s the first impression TikTok is making on new users before the algorithm even begins personalizing their feed. And if that sounds concerning, the findings around children’s content are even harder to ignore.
The algorithm’s junk-food era
TikTok’s recommendation engine is designed to adapt quickly. The platform looks at everything from likes and follows to watch time and scrolling habits before deciding what to show you next. To understand what an untouched TikTok experience looks like, researchers created a fresh account and examined the first 500 videos served on the For You page. The results were startling: 294 of those videos were classified as AI slop. That means a new user is more likely to encounter AI-generated junk than human-created content before TikTok has any meaningful data about their preferences.
Perhaps even more telling is how TikTok compares to other platforms. Kapwing previously ran a similar experiment on YouTube Shorts and found substantially less AI-generated clutter. TikTok wasn’t just worse — it was dramatically worse. At this point, AI content isn’t merely sneaking into the platform. It’s becoming part of the platform’s default aesthetic. And that may be the real story here. For many users, especially younger ones, AI-generated videos aren’t an occasional oddity anymore. They’re becoming normal.
Sesame Street meets the uncanny valley
The most alarming section of the report focuses on content aimed at children. Researchers found that more than half of the videos in TikTok’s Kids category qualified as AI-generated “slop.” One hashtag in particular, #CartoonKids, was almost completely overtaken by AI-generated material, with only a handful of videos appearing to be made by humans. Anyone who has stumbled across these videos will recognize the formula immediately — familiar cartoon characters appear in bizarre scenarios, educational lessons are riddled with mistakes, characters speak with unsettling synthetic voices, animations shift and morph in ways that don’t quite make sense.
The content often resembles children’s programming at first glance, but falls apart the moment you pay attention. That’s what makes it troubling. Young children aren’t equipped to distinguish between high-quality educational content and an AI-generated imitation that confidently presents incorrect information. A counting lesson that gets the numbers wrong may seem ridiculous to an adult, but a preschooler doesn’t have the same context. The internet has always had questionable content for kids. What’s changed is the scale. Generative AI enables the creation of endless streams of videos at a pace no human creator could ever match. And TikTok’s recommendation system appears more than willing to distribute them.
The problem extends beyond children’s content, too. The study found that educational, science, health, and history videos were among the categories most heavily affected by AI slop. That’s particularly unfortunate because these are precisely the topics where accuracy matters most. A poorly generated comedy skit is easy enough to scroll past. A history lesson filled with fabricated details or a health video presenting misleading advice is a different story altogether. To be fair, not every creator using AI is producing garbage. Some creators are experimenting with AI-generated presenters and visuals to make educational topics more engaging. In the best cases, AI functions as a tool that supports the creator’s work rather than replacing it. But the report highlights a growing reality across social media: the incentives often reward volume over quality. If a creator can generate dozens of videos in the time it once took to make one, platforms become flooded with content that is technically watchable but offers very little substance.
TikTok seems aware that users are growing tired of it. The company has introduced controls that allow users to reduce the amount of AI-generated content they see and has invested in AI literacy initiatives. Yet the research suggests those efforts may be struggling to keep pace with the flood. The irony is that social media became popular because it offered something distinctly human: creativity, personality, expertise, and connection. AI can imitate all of those things surprisingly well. But imitation isn’t the same as authenticity. When nearly six out of every ten videos a new user sees are AI-generated, the question is no longer whether AI slop exists on TikTok. The question is whether it has become a defining feature of the platform. And for a generation of children growing up with these feeds, that answer matters more than ever.
