Advocacy groups urge YouTube to protect kids from ‘AI slop’ videos

Advocacy groups and experts condemned YouTube for serving up low-quality artificial intelligence-generated videos to its most vulnerable audience: children.

In a letter to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of YouTube’s parent company Google, children’s advocacy group Fairplay expresses “serious concern” about the spread of AI-generated videos on both YouTube and YouTube Kids.

The letter, which was sent yesterday, was signed by more than 200 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators.

“This ’ AI slop ’ harms children’s development by distorting their sense of reality, overwhelming their learning processes and hijacking their attention, thereby extending time online and displacing offline activities necessary for their healthy development,” the letter reads. “These harms are particularly acute for young children.”

The letter calls on YouTube to clearly label all AI-generated content and ban any AI-generated content on YouTube Kids. They also propose barring AI-generated videos from being recommended to users under 18 and implementing an option for parents to turn off AI-generated content even if their child searches for it.