NEW DELHI: Even as original video and audio content struggle for attention in a crowded digital ecosystem, a new threat is compounding the problem: a surge of low-cost, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated material that is reshaping discovery, monetization and trust across platforms.
Often dubbed “AI slop”, this content is mass-produced, repetitive and generic, flooding feeds and pushing higher-quality work out of view. For creators, the immediate hit is visibility: strong content gets buried under volume, making consistent engagement and monetization harder to sustain in a market where revenue is already concentrated among a small fraction of players.
One common manifestation of AI-generated content is the proliferation of cover versions of popular songs, often created and distributed at scale using AI tools. For instance, the music of last year’s romantic hit Saiyaara saw multiple such renditions, including AI-generated versions.
A recent Deloitte report underscores the broader shift: over 92% of content in India now use generative AI tools, sharply lowering the cost and time required to produce content.
For platforms, the bigger risk is trust. Industry experts say that once users suspect content is AI-generated, engagement drops—they sense the inauthenticity even if they can’t always name it. As AI slop becomes easier to spot, that trust penalty is beginning to play out at scale.
“For platforms, the primary struggle is algorithmic integrity; recommendation engines designed to reward engagement can inadvertently prioritize low-effort - shock bait, leading to user fatigue and a complex monetization strain as they try to filter out bots from genuine storytellers,” said Anshita Kulshrestha, founder, TukTuki Entertainments, a micro-drama mobile entertainment company.
“For creators, the challenge is one of visibility and discovery. When thousands of clips can be generated in the time it takes to script a single scene, human-centric narratives face a discovery deficit. This saturation often leads to engagement dilution, where passive consumption patterns make it harder to build the deep, emotional trust that high-quality drama requires,” Kulshrestha said.
Prashant Puri, co-founder and chief executive of AdLift, a global digital marketing agency, said the forms of AI slop vary widely: auto-spun articles, fake reviews, AI voiceover videos, synthetic images, and even mass-generated LinkedIn profiles. “What’s striking is how concentrated the supply is, a small number of automated content farm accounts can produce the vast majority of it on any given platform,” Puri said.
Platforms, for their part, say they are stepping up efforts to curb the spread of such content.
In a recent letter, Neal Mohan, chief executive, YouTube shared that to reduce the spread of low quality AI content, the company is actively building on its established systems that have been very successful in combating spam and clickbait, and reducing the spread of low quality, repetitive content.
“Our Community Guidelines have long prohibited harmful misinformation, and we remove content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm. We’re committed to removing any content that violates our policies, which we enforce using a combination of machine learning and human reviewers,” YouTube said in response to Mint’s queries. “We clearly label content created by YouTube’s AI products, and creators must disclose when they've created realistic altered or synthetic content,” it added.
That said, many argue today’s guardrails remain reactive. Platforms act after content breaches a threshold, while content farms adapt as soon as detection methods become known.
“What’s missing is a classification capability rather than a flag. The detection signals that actually hold up are behavioural, upload patterns, network membership, how a channel operates over time. These are properties of a business model, not a technology, and a content farm will always exhibit them regardless of how sophisticated its tools become. The goal was never to counter AI content. It's not about ‘did AI touch this?’ but ‘does this deliver genuine value, or does it exist to extract money from a platform?” said Kartik Mehta, chief business officer and head of Asia, Channel Factory, a global technology and data platform.
Many also point out that AI itself is not the problem, but how it is used.
“The value of curation and original thought, including in prompting any AI tool being used, is underrated and can have a huge impact on quality, personalization and overall output. It will also have better intellectual property protections, if tested against more generic content and prompts,” said Shreya Suri, partner at CMS INDUSLAW.