As the debate over the creative and ethical value of using AI to generate video rages on, users are getting interesting results out of the machine, and artist-led AI content is gaining respect in some areas. Top film schools now offer courses on the use and ethics of AI in film production, and the world’s best-known brands are utilizing AI in their creative process — albeit with mixed results.

Sadly, others are gaming the novelty of AI’s prompt-and-go content, using these engines to churn out vast quantities of AI “slop” — the “spam” of the video-first age.

Wiktionary defines a slopper as “Someone who is overreliant on generative AI tools such as ChatGPT; a producer of AI slop.” Along with the proliferation of “brainrot” videos online, sloppers are making it tough for principled and talented creators to get their videos seen.

The main point of AI slop and brainrot videos is to grab your attention, and this type of content seems harder and harder to avoid. But exactly how prevalent is it in the grand scheme of things?

Kapwing analyzed the view and subscriber counts of trending AI slop and brainrot YouTube channels to find out which ones are competing most fiercely with handmade content around the world and how much revenue the leading sloppers are making.

What We Did

We identified the top 100 trending YouTube channels in every country and noted the AI slop channels. Next, we used socialblade.com to retrieve the number of views, subscribers, and estimated yearly revenue for these channels and aggregated these figures for each country to deduce their popularity. We also created a new YouTube account to record the number of AI slop and brainrot videos among the first 500 YouTube Shorts we cycled through to get an idea of the new-user experience.

Key Findings

• Spain’s trending AI slop channels have a combined 20.22 million subscribers — the most of any country.
• In South Korea, the trending AI slop channels have amassed 8.45 billion views.
• The AI slop channel with the most views is India’s Bandar Apna Dost (2.07 billion views).
  • The channel has estimated annual earnings of $4,251,500.
• U.S.-based slop channel Cuentos Facinantes [sic] has the most subscribers of any slop channel globally (5.95 million).
• Brainrot videos account for around 33% of the first 500 YouTube shorts on a new user’s feed.

Spanish and South Korean AI Slop Channels Have Most Devoted Viewerships

First, we analyzed the 100 top trending video channels in every country to see how prevalent AI slop has become locally.

We found that Spain has 20.22 million AI slop channel subscribers among its trending channels. This is despite Spain having fewer AI slop channels (eight) among its top 100 channels than countries including Pakistan (20), Egypt (14), South Korea (11) and the U.S. (nine). The U.S. has the third-most slop subscribers (14.47 million) — 28.4% fewer than Spain but 13.18% more than fourth-placed Brazil (12.56 million).

Spain’s AI slop subscriber base is boosted significantly by one channel, Imperio de jesus, which had 5.87 million subscribers at the time of analysis, making it the world’s second biggest AI slop channel (see A Spanish-Language U.S. AI Slop Channel is the World’s Most-Subscribed below).

Promising to strengthen “faith in Jesus through fun interactive quizzes,” the channel’s videos put the Son of God in a range of either/or scenarios where he must give the correct answer to get the better of Satan, the Grinch and others. Two other Spanish channels with over 3.5 million subscribers each focus on comedy/brainrot shorts.

While Spain’s eight trending AI slop channels may have the most subscribers, South Korea’s 11 trenders have the most views: some 8.45 billion in total. This is nearly 1.6 times as many as second-placed Pakistan (5.34B), 2.5 times as many as the third-placed U.S. (3.39B) and 3.4 times as many as Spain (2.52B).

South Korean AI slop channel Three Minutes Wisdom alone accounts for nearly a quarter of the country’s massive view count, with 2.02 billion views. Three Minutes Wisdom has the second-highest view count of any trending slop channel globally, and we estimate the channel’s annual ad income to be around US$4,036,500.

The channel’s 140 videos typically feature photorealistic(ish) footage of wild animals being defeated by cute pets, and the URL in the bio appears to be an affiliate link to Coupang, South Korea’s largest online retailer.

A Spanish-language U.S. AI Slop Channel is the World’s Most-Subscribed

Next, we identified the specific channels with the most subscribers and views globally. U.S.-based Cuentos Facinantes [sic] has 5.95 million subscribers, making it the trending AI slop channel with the biggest following. This is only 1.4% more than Imperio de jesus (5.87M) but over 50% more than the eighth-, ninth- and tenth-most subscribed slop channels.

Cuentos Facinantes [sic] (Fascinating Tales) has attracted some 1.28 billion views, serving up low-quality Dragon Ball-themed videos. The channel was established in 2020, but the earliest video currently hosted is from as recently as Jan. 8, 2025.

Five of the other ten trending AI slop channels with the most views are based in South Korea, with others in Egypt, Brazil and Pakistan. But the channel with the most views of all is in India. Bandar Apna Dost features over 500 videos, mainly “featuring a realistic monkey in hilarious, dramatic, and heart-touching human-style situations,” Many of which are variations on identical set-ups. The channel also has around 100,000 followers on Instagram; on Facebook, the videos are attributed to a ‘digital creator’ named Surajit Karmakar.

If they’re monetizing their views, channels like Bandar Apna Dost may be making millions of dollars per year. But YouTube faces a dilemma over AI content. 

On the one hand, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan cites generative AI as the biggest game-changer for YouTube since the original “revelation” that ordinary folk wanted to watch each other’s videos, saying that generative AI can do for video what the synthesizer did for music.

On the other hand, the company worries that its advertisers will feel devalued by having their ads attached to slop.

The AI slop channels with the highest potential earnings mostly line up with the top ten for views. This is because Social Blade estimates channel income based on annual views, and most of these channels’ videos have been published over the last few months. Using an average rate of revenue per 1,000 views, Bandar Apna Dost has an estimated annual revenue of $4.25 million.

“The genius is going to lie whether you did it in a way that was profoundly original or creative,” Mohan told Wired. “Just because the content is 75 percent AI generated doesn't make it any better or worse than a video that’s 5 percent AI generated. What's important is that it was done by a human being.”

Whether those flooding the platform with auto-generated content to make a buck care about being known as creative geniuses is another matter.

On A New YouTube Feed, 33% of Videos are Brainrot

Finally, we simulated the experience of an untainted YouTube shorts algorithm by establishing a new YouTube account and noting the occurrence of AI slop or brainrot videos among the first 500 videos in the feed. While we were spared either of these for the first 16 videos in the feed, in total, 104 (21%) of the first 500 videos were AI-generated, and 165 (33%) of those 500 videos were brainrot.

Whether this prevalence of slop and brainrot on our test feed represents the engineering of YouTube’s algorithm or the sheer proliferation of such videos that are being uploaded is a mystery that only Google can answer. But the Guardian’s analysis of YouTube’s figures for July revealed that nearly “one in 10 of the fastest growing YouTube channels globally are showing AI-generated content only.” 

And brainrot, like AI slop, is a mixed blessing for YouTube as a company: it may lack the soul or professionalism with which YouTube’s advertisers wish to be associated, but brainrot is moreish by design.

Brainrot’s natural home is the feed, whether viewers are compelled to keep watching to “numb” themselves from the trials of the world around them, or to stay up to date with the potentially infinite “lore” of emergent brainrot subgenres, which incorporate recurring characters and themes.

Media Studies for All

The term “AI slop” has been variously pinned to “unreviewed” content, to AI-generated media that may have been reviewed but with minimal quality standards (like Coke’s Christmas ads), and to all AI-generated content. As Rob Horning points out, the idea that only some AI media is slop propagates the idea that the rest is legitimate and the technology’s proliferation is inevitable.

Part of the threat of AI slop and some forms of brainrot is in how they have been normalized and may come across as harmless fun. But slop and brainrot prey on the laziest areas of our mental faculties. Researchers have shown how the “illusory truth effect” makes people more likely to believe in claims or imagery the more often they encounter it. AI tools make it easy for bad-faith actors to construct a fake enemy or situation that supports their underlying political beliefs or goals. Seeing is believing, studies have shown, even when the viewer has been explicitly told that a video is fake. 

Meanwhile, “information of any kind, in enough quantities, becomes noise,” writes researcher and artist Eryk Salvaggio. The prevalence of AI slop is “a symptom of information exhaustion, and an increased human dependency on algorithmic filters to sort the world on our behalf.” And, as Doug Shapiro notes, as this noise drowns out the signal on the web, including social networks, the value of trust will rise — and so will corporate and political efforts to fabricate and manipulate trust.

And this is why, rather than attending film school to study AI techniques, it may be more valuable for creators and consumers alike — especially those still in school — to double down on Media Studies.

Methodology & Sources

We manually researched the top 100 trending YouTube channels in every country (on playboard.co) to isolate the AI slop channels. 

We then used socialblade.com to retrieve the number of views, subscribers and estimated yearly revenue (using the midpoint values) for these channels.

We aggregated these figures for each country's AI slop channels to get an idea of their popularity.

In addition, we created a new YouTube account and recorded the number of AI slop and brainrot videos among the first 500 YouTube Shorts we cycled through to get an idea of the new-user experience.

Data is correct as of October 2025.