AI slop is proliferating on YouTube—and major brands are advertising against it

If you’re on the internet these days, you’d be hard-pressed to not run into AI slop.

The term, which refers to low-quality AI-generated content that is beginning to proliferate on social media platforms like Instagram and video platforms like YouTube, are often bizarre and are sometimes even funny. But for some brands concerned about brand safety and suitability, having ads run against such content might be no laughing matter.

On YouTube though, ads for brands are sometimes appearing next to such AI-slop content. A look at several YouTube pages that post AI slop revealed some major brands’ advertisements showing up against those pages’ content, which ranges from simply strange to AI-generated misinformation.

One channel, called Pan-African Dreams, has shared misinformation and recently made the news for posting a lengthy deepfake video that falsely depicts Pope Leo XIV delivering a speech praising Ibrahim Traoré, the military leader of Burkina Faso, prompting a response from the Vatican. In mid-May, the video had racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube.

Marketing Brew observed brands including HBO Max, Amazon Hub Delivery, theater ticket seller TodayTix, and the tourism site Visit Florida appearing against content on the channel.

Another AI slop channel, Banana Adventure, posts bizarre videos mostly centered on Minions, the characters from the Despicable Me franchise, as well as other characters like the Joker. Marketing Brew observed ads for Amazon Hub Delivery, Android, and Tia Health next to that channel’s content.

And on a third AI slop channel with the name Mikey, which seems to post mostly what appear to be AI-generated cartoon stills with AI-generated voice-overs, including images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Marketing Brew saw ads for Adobe and Samsung Home Appliances.

In an email, Google spokesperson Nate Funkhouser told Marketing Brew that YouTube does not currently offer advertisers the ability to opt out of appearing next to AI-generated content. “We offer controls for advertisers to decide where their ads run based on the content of a video, not how it was produced,” Funkhouser said in the statement.

Emails requesting comment sent to Android, HBO Max, Samsung, TodayTix, and Visit Florida went unreturned. Representatives for Adobe, Amazon Hub Delivery, and Tia Health did not provide comment.

After viewing the ads on Banana Adventure and Pan-African Dreams and requesting comment from YouTube, both channels were removed from the platform. The Mikey channel, meanwhile, was not found to violate YouTube’s policies, according to Google.

Playing defense

For some brands, monitoring exactly where their ads are showing up on YouTube has already seemed like a game of Whac-A-Mole. In recent years, major brands’ advertisements have been spotted running against climate misinformation, medical misinformation, and racist and antisemitic content, even, at times, those that were using brand-safety tools.

In the case of AI slop on YouTube, though, some of those existing challenges for brand safety and suitability stand to be multiplied. Brands should be mindful about appearing next to AI-generated content, said Anirudh Dhebar, a marketing professor at Babson College, as advertising next to AI slop could contain reputational risk for brands. 

And while a brand may not necessarily take issue with being associated with AI-generated content in itself, issues could arise if that AI-generated slop overlaps with other potentially damaging content. Both Disney and Universal are suing the generative AI company Midjourney, alleging that users can easily create images based on protected intellectual property, representing a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

Tyler Folkman, GM at TubeBuddy, which offers a suite of tools for YouTubers, said that he doesn’t expect many AI slop channels to flourish for too long on YouTube due to likely low levels of engagement on their videos, but he acknowledged that it can be difficult to get problematic AI slop videos taken down from YouTube due to the platform’s vast size.

As of March 2024, YouTube has put in place some restrictions on uploading AI-generated content that requires creators to disclose if AI tools were used to create a video. More broadly, YouTube has policies prohibiting spam, scams, hate speech, misinformation, and other types of content on the platform.

Dhebar told Marketing Brew that the proliferation of AI slop in its various forms can present additional challenges for advertisers.

“If I’m an advertiser, I need to be very mindful, and I’m in a precarious point,” he explained. “On one hand, I want the biggest bang for my dollar, that’s in the short term; [in] the longer term, there might be significant reputational risk. How do I balance those two?”