Ever seen a comment from a channel created a day ago, with no
punctuation and a generic statement?
That was probably a bot.
For a long time, YouTube has struggled with automated bots. These bots do various actions like liking, commenting, and some of them even post their own videos. The bots are used mostly for ad revenue, status/engagement inflation, and more black-hat activities.
What They Do
The most recent examples of video-making bots I've
seen have been following a template and scraping social media sites
for content.
From what I've seen, this seems to be their workflow:
- They create a new YouTube channel, with a generic name like "Curiosity", sometimes impersonating a brand.
- They use AI to generate a profile description and image.
- They scrape social media like Facebook for topics and images.
- These scraped results are fed through AI to create engaging content and a title.
- They also use AI to generate a related image or short video if there is no image found.
- A video is uploaded on YouTube Shorts, showing the channel name and a "Verified" badge, with the content from Steps 4-5.
The Flood
These videos are quite common - short-form,
informative, and sometimes interesting.
However, when you have millions of these bot accounts competing in the
same feed, it gets chaotic.
On many videos, a significant number of the likes and comments are
bots, and even replies can be bots. It's very overwhelming.
The average user doesn't know how to spot bots, and it's quite hard to
do so, since they are programmed to act like regular, everyday users.
The Impact
A recent study by Kapwing
concluded that, on average, over 20% of videos shown to new users are
AI slop
or
brainrot. This means for new users, over a fifth of the videos shown are
likely to be low-effort content.
However, it is important to note that not all AI-generated content is
from automated bots.
Some people do intentionally prompt AI for videos and images.
How to Prevent Bot Videos
It's quite straightforward to prevent bot videos from appearing on
your feed.
The main issue is the sheer quantity of the bots, as thousands of bot
accounts are created every day.
On a bot video (you can tell from the list above), click the three
dots at the top right corner of the screen.
Then select "Not Interested", or better, "Don't Recommend This
Channel".
This gives YouTube feedback that you don't like those specific video
types so it won't show you as often.
Be aware that this method isn't completely foolproof. You will still
occasionally see these bot videos appear in the feed.
This method helps keep these videos out of your feed for a while. It
is a bad idea to intentionally watch bot videos, as these
could teach YouTube to start recommending them in your feed again.