Snapchat is officially joining the race to clean AI slop out of social media.The company announced July 31 that wholly AI-generated videos will no longer be eligible for recommendation in Spotlight, Snapchat’s discovery feed for trending videos from creators across the platform in order to "reward authentic creativity."The policy does not prevent users from posting AI-generated videos elsewhere on Snapchat. It also does not disqualify every video that involves AI. Creators can continue using Snapchat’s AI tools to edit or enhance their original footage, and those videos will remain eligible for Spotlight recommendations with transparency indicators.
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The line Snapchat is drawing comes down to who, or what, created the underlying video. AI can help a person make something. It cannot make the entire thing and still expect Snapchat’s recommendation system to distribute it."As low-quality, repetitive, AI-generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people," the company wrote in a blog post.Keeping entirely generated videos out of Spotlight matters on the platform because recommendation is what allow a creator’s work to reach people who do not already follow them. Removing that distribution makes Spotlight far less valuable as a growth channel for automated content farms that can produce synthetic videos at scale.It also protects a part of Snapchat that has been attracting more creators. Snap said the number of unique people contributing to Spotlight globally has increased by more than 120 percent over the past year.Exactly how Snapchat will identify wholly AI-generated videos is less clear. The company has not explained what level of human involvement would make a video eligible or how it will distinguish an AI-enhanced recording from a generated video that received a few human edits.
