75 million songs and 130,000 channels deleted: The great internet cleanup begins
From YouTube and Spotify to X and Apple Music, low-quality AI content is flooding the web on a massive scale. Now, tech giants are deleting millions of items, attempting to curb a phenomenon they themselves helped create.
The internet is drowning in digital "slop." From Google searches suggesting recipes for pizza with glue, to fake biographies on Amazon, to images of "Shrimp Jesus" in our Facebook feeds, the digital waste generated by artificial intelligence is polluting the information ecosystem. Now, as reported by The New York Times, Silicon Valley is trying to take out the trash.
Big tech companies, which often built the very tools that allowed the web to be flooded with low-quality content, are now embarking on a detox. Spotify, for example, removed 75 million "spammy" and duplicated audio tracks last year.
LinkedIn recently announced that fighting "AI slop" is its top priority, and even developed a button allowing users to report it. On YouTube, the deletion of 130,000 channels and 50,000 account clusters distributing low-quality content testifies to the scale of the problem. According to an experiment conducted, more than 20% of the short videos shown to new users on YouTube are junk produced by artificial intelligence, with one of the popular channels in the field estimated to have raked in 4.25 million dollars a year until it was suspended.
It seems the general public is starting to lose patience. "Users are getting angrier," noted a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment, adding that public opinion has forced companies to finally confront the problem.
The phenomenon has become so common that the Merriam-Webster dictionary chose the word "Slop" as its word of the year for 2025. Artificial content is taking over every good part: on Apple Music, more than a third of the uploaded content is created by AI, and on the social network X, almost half of the posts longer than 50 words were created in a similar way.
Ironically, many of the companies now fighting the phenomenon are the ones enabling it. Meta, for example, promotes the identification and labeling of AI content, but at the same time faced harsh criticism after launching an image generator that used public Instagram accounts by default.
Platforms like TikTok and Pinterest have begun testing tools that will allow users to control the amount of artificial content displayed to them. However, experts quoted in The Times warn that this is a systemic problem, and attempting to solve it with technical patches alone may fail. Curbing the synthetic "slop" is necessary to prevent a situation where it crowds out human creativity and undermines the entire public discourse.
