Snapchat is officially joining the race to clean AI slop out of social media.
The company announced July 31 that wholly AI-generated videos will no longer be eligible for recommendation in Spotlight, Snapchat’s discovery feed for trending videos from creators across the platform in order to “reward authentic creativity.”
The policy does not prevent users from posting AI-generated videos elsewhere on Snapchat. It also does not disqualify every video that involves AI. Creators can continue using Snapchat’s AI tools to edit or enhance their original footage, and those videos will remain eligible for Spotlight recommendations with transparency indicators.
The line Snapchat is drawing comes down to who, or what, created the underlying video. AI can help a person make something. It cannot make the entire thing and still expect Snapchat’s recommendation system to distribute it.
“As low-quality, repetitive, AI-generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Keeping entirely generated videos out of Spotlight matters on the platform because recommendation is what allow a creator’s work to reach people who do not already follow them. Removing that distribution makes Spotlight far less valuable as a growth channel for automated content farms that can produce synthetic videos at scale.
It also protects a part of Snapchat that has been attracting more creators. Snap said the number of unique people contributing to Spotlight globally has increased by more than 120 percent over the past year.
Exactly how Snapchat will identify wholly AI-generated videos is less clear. The company has not explained what level of human involvement would make a video eligible or how it will distinguish an AI-enhanced recording from a generated video that received a few human edits.
Snap acknowledged that challenge in its announcement, saying that “no detection system is perfect.”
Social platforms are reconsidering AI slop
Snapchat isn’t the first platform to decide that the flood of repetitive AI content is becoming a problem for its users.
LinkedIn began expanding tools in July that allow members to report posts and comments that “seem like AI slop.” The company is also introducing classifiers intended to reduce low-quality AI content in recommendations and replacing its “enhance your post” writing feature with a more limited proofreading tool.
LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan emphasized that the company does not consider all AI-assisted work to be slop. The concern is content that feels automated, generic, or disconnected from the person publishing it.
Substack has taken a transparency-focused approach. On July 21, the newsletter platform introduced an optional AI-detection feature built with Pangram. Readers can scan posts, notes, replies, and comments longer than 100 words to receive an estimate of how much of the text was written by a person or with AI assistance.
YouTube’s current policies similarly make repetitive or mass-produced “inauthentic content” ineligible for monetization. Its spam rules also prohibit creators from using automated or synthetic tools to flood the platform with large volumes of nearly identical videos.
TikTok has also put more of the decision in viewers’ hands. The platform began testing a setting in November that lets users increase or decrease the amount of AI-generated content that appears in their For You feeds.
Snapchat’s decision also arrives as Meta imagines a very different future for social media.
In its latest earnings remarks on July 29, Meta said its Muse image and video models would create a “nearly infinite universe of personalized content” across its platforms. That AI-generated material would become another source of recommendations alongside posts from friends and established creators.
Snapchat is making a different bet for Spotlight. As synthetic video becomes easier to produce and harder to distinguish from recorded footage, the platform is reserving its most valuable discovery space for content that begins with a person.
Drawing that line may be easier than enforcing it. Still, Snapchat has made its preference clear: AI can stay behind the scenes. Spotlight belongs to the humans.
Source: https://mashable.com/life/snapchat-ai-slop-spotlight-videos
