A toddler watching something that I hope isn't AI slop.
CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images
Imagine you're 3 years old. You've gorged yourself on an afternoon snack of expensive berries, and you have no idea what the Strait of Hormuz is. Life is good. Your mom or dad needs to take a bathroom break and hands you their phone to watch some videos while strange sounds and smells happen behind the closed door.You watch a cartoon of a young boy with the Cocomelon phenotype face playing with several colored balloons and a red toy truck that looks suspiciously like Lightning McQueen from "Cars."Something's slightly off, but it's not totally clear what — could it be that the balloons sometimes have two knots? Or when the clear water balloons explode, they expel paint instead of water? This flies against some of your early observations of the natural world, but the video sure is entertaining. If you could read, you might see the tiny print of a label at the bottom of the TikTok app that reads "Contains AI-generated media." But you, and probably most of the other 280,000 viewers of this video, cannot read.AI slop for kids is here — especially in the cartoons aimed at toddlers and preschoolers on YouTube. These AI-generated videos of colors and letters are also all over TikTok, says a new report by Kapwing, a video editing software company.The report analyzed thousands of TikTok videos with kid-targeted hashtags and classified more than half as AI slop, which Kapwing defines as "careless, low-quality content generated using automatic computer applications and distributed to farm views and subscriptions or sway political opinion." Videos were categorized as slop if they carried TikTok's AI-generated content label or, in some cases, contained obvious signs of generative AI.AI is prevalent elsewhere in the app, as well, the report said. Kapwing created a new TikTok account (with no specific age identifiers) and said 59% of the content on its For You Page was some form of AI slop.That's bleak, but it's most grim when looking at the levels of AI-slop targeting kids versus other categories. Here's what they found:
