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:
(I should note here that Kapwing makes video-editing software; they’re not a research firm or child advocacy group. They’re also somewhat of a competitor to the popular CapCut app, which is owned by ByteDance along with TikTok). TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
When Kapwing drilled more into kids-targeted content, here’s what they found:
Of course, it’s not surprising that #cartoonkids is largely slop, because AI is so prevalent in animation. But Kapwing also found 83% of videos with the hashtag #babysong qualified as AI slop, along with 77% of #nurseryrhyme videos, and 52% of #kidslearning.
Yikes!
I suppose I should take a pause here and point out that TikTok is not really an ideal place for toddlers to hang out. Unlike the dedicated YouTube Kids app, there’s no dedicated separate app for under-13s on TikTok. (TikTok has a teen experience for 13-17 year olds, where parents can link accounts to monitor and control the experience, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here; this is more stuff for toddlers and preschoolers.)
TikTok allows users under 13 to sign up, and it puts them into a very limited experience with curated content for kids.
I tested this by signing up for a new TikTok account with a 2020 birth year. When I scrolled through the feed, the top videos were slop-free — there were animal videos, coloring and art videos, some soccer and unboxing videos. Not the most enriching stuff out there, but I didn’t initially see any AI slop.
When I search some of those hashtags like #nurseryrhymes or #kidscartoons on my own adult account, however, I see plenty of it — some of it with millions of views. Clearly, some little kids are watching this on adult accounts — my guess is that parents are passing their own phones to their kids to watch some videos when they need a moment of distraction.
What does this kidslop look like?
Imagine training an AI on hours and hours of Cocomelon, and somehow the results make you long for the comparatively “human” feelings of classic YouTube Kids fare like “Johny Johny Yes Papa.”
These videos are churned out at a massive scale for profit, and they’re not always educationally sound on a basic level. Emily Tate Sullivan recently reported for Mother Jones on the proliferation of AI slop for kids on YouTube, and how experts are concerned both about how young brains absorb it, and how low-quality it can be:
Not great!
I try to keep an open mind about some of the AI-generated videos that are flooding social networks. Some of the surreal and weird ones, like soap operas about adulterous anthropomorphic fruits, are genuinely amusing, and I think that adults can enjoy them for what they are.
But the stuff targeted to toddlers and little kids, who can’t tell if something is AI-generated, feels opportunistic. My personal feelings on this are that it’s fine to sometimes let kids watch entertaining videos — and sometimes adults need a break. I’m not the screentime police here, far from it. But from my limited review, many of these videos are not high-quality educational content, even if they include the word “learning” in the video title.
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