Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, announced Friday that it would stop recommending wholly AI-generated videos in its popular Spotlight feed. The company said it would instead prioritize authentic, human-made content.
The move comes after similar announcements from YouTube, LinkedIn, and Substack over the past two weeks, according to BBC News. The wave of policy changes reflects growing concern across major platforms about the spread of what critics have taken to calling AI slop: writing, images, and videos created entirely by artificial intelligence tools with little or no human input.
Snap stopped short of banning all AI-generated content from its platform. The company offers its own AI tools that allow users to alter or enhance content, and that type of AI-assisted material will still be eligible for recommendation. However, Snap acknowledged that entirely AI-generated content is typically described by the company as low-quality, repetitive, and not what Snapchat users want to see.
LinkedIn took a different approach, introducing a button that allows any user to flag a post or comment as potentially AI-generated. Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's chief product officer, wrote on the platform that AI slop is a top priority. He said the platform had blocked billions of attempts to post AI-generated comments in just the last couple of months.
"Every day we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts," Srinivasan said.
LinkedIn also said it would remove an automated prompt that offered to enhance posts through AI, replacing it with a simpler proofreading tool. Like Snap, LinkedIn said it is not rejecting AI use entirely, and users who use AI to refine posts should not be affected by the crackdown.
Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best announced a new tool designed to let readers detect AI-generated writing on the newsletter platform. He cited research finding that up to 40 percent of writing on social media is now fake or AI-generated.
"Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom," Best said.
YouTube updated its policies this month around what kind of AI-generated content creators can monetize, adding another layer to the platform-wide shift.
Research cited by BBC News found that the more AI-generated content people encounter in a social media feed, the less likely they are to trust that any of the content they see online is genuine. That finding appears to be driving urgency among platforms to act before user trust erodes further.
