TL;DR
Kapwing found that 59% of TikTok videos shown to new accounts are from AI, three times the rate of YouTube, with children’s content being the most affected category.
Nearly six out of every ten videos TikTok shows on a new account are AI-generated garbage. That is the central finding. from a report published by video editing platform Kapwingwhich analyzed 10,742 TikTok videos across 20 popular categories and separately examined the first 500 videos displayed on the For You page of a newly created account.
Of those 500 videos, 294 were classified as AI waste, a term Kapwing defines as videos with obvious AI-generated images or low-quality compilations that use clearly AI-generated scripts and voiceovers. The 59 percent rate is approximately three times the proportion found on YouTube in the same study, dramatically worsening the default TikTok experience for anyone opening the app for the first time.
The numbers are worse for children. Kapwing found that 57 percent of videos in TikTok’s Kids category qualified as AI slop, the highest rate of any category the researchers examined. Science and education were next at 35 percent, followed by health at almost 34 percent and history at about the same level.
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At the other end of the spectrum, fitness, music and fashion content remained almost entirely human-created, each under two percent.
One hashtag in particular illustrates the magnitude of the problem. Within #CartoonKids, 97 out of 100 videos reviewed were AI-generated, leaving only three that appeared to have been made by humans. Related tags were almost as bad: #cartoons and #babysong reached 83 percent, and #forkids reached 79 percent.
The formula behind these videos is recognizable to anyone who has come across them. Familiar cartoon characters appear in strange settings, educational lessons are riddled with factual errors, characters speak in synthetic voices, and animations shift and morph in ways that don’t make much sense. A counting lesson where you get the numbers wrong may seem absurd to an adult, but a preschooler doesn’t have the context to notice.
Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago, described the phenomenon as “Misinformation about AI for young children on an industrial scale.” the study reports. The concern is not just that individual videos are bad, but that generative AI allows the creation of endless sequences of them at a pace that no human creator could match.
The problem extends far beyond content aimed at children. Educational, scientific, health, and history videos are among the most saturated categories of AI-generated material, which is particularly damaging because those are the topics where accuracy is most important.
It’s easy to overlook a poorly generated comedy sketch. A history lesson full of made-up details or a health video presenting misleading advice is a different kind of failure.
TikTok’s recommendation engine is designed to adapt quickly, using signals like view time, likes, follows, and scrolling behavior to personalize what each user sees. But Kapwing’s research focuses on what happens before personalization kicks in, when a new account hasn’t provided behavioral data and the algorithm is essentially a guess.
The result is that the AI ​​crash has become TikTok’s default first impression. For a platform that built its growth on its recommendation algorithm, that’s a major problem.
TikTok is no stranger to the problem. The company introduced controls in November 2025 that allow users to increase or decrease the amount of AI-generated content in their feeds and has invested in AI literacy initiatives. Kapwing maintains that such passive controls are not enough, and the data suggests that the measures have not significantly reduced the volume of AI reaching new users.
The platform also faces growing legal pressure over its handling of children’s content. Florida sued TikTok earlier this month under its children’s social media law, alleging that the platform allowed minors to access the app and misled parents about the content available to them. The findings about the decline of AI add another dimension to regulatory scrutiny: Even when children are on the platform legally, the content they encounter can be overwhelmingly low-quality and machine-generated.
The comparison with YouTube is instructive. Kapwing found that about 21 percent of YouTube shorts recommended for a new account were AI glitches, less than half the rate of TikTok. YouTube has taken a more aggressive enforcement approach, terminating 16 channels with a combined total of 35 million subscribers and nearly five billion lifetime views under its inauthentic content policy in January 2026.
That crackdown has drawn criticism for catching faceless legitimate creators in the crossfire, but the gap between platforms remains stark.
The broader pattern is consistent across all social networks. AI-generated content is flooding music streaming platforms Additionally, services like Deezer now record over 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day.
The incentive structure rewards volume over quality: If a bot creator or operator can produce dozens of videos in the time it previously took to make one, platforms become saturated with content that is technically viewable but offers little substance.
It is worth noting the limitations of the study. Kapwing is a video editing tools company with a commercial interest in human-created content and the classification of what counts as “pending AI” involved manual review rather than automated detection. The researchers created an initial list of 20 popular TikTok categories, selected at least three popular tags for each, and reviewed videos for obvious AI-generated images and scripts, a methodology that is transparent but subjective.
The study also captures a snapshot from May 2026, and TikTok’s algorithm and moderation policies could change. The platform has not publicly disputed the findings.
Still, the scale of the data—more than 10,000 videos in 20 categories plus testing 500 videos from new accounts—makes it the most comprehensive examination of AI content density on TikTok published yet. And the findings on children’s content are difficult to dismiss regardless of the methodology: when 97 out of every 100 videos in a children’s hashtag are machine-generated, the precise definition of “dirty water“It matters less than the fact that virtually nothing in that food was made by a human.
Social media became popular because it offered something distinctly human: creativity, personality, experience and connection. AI can imitate all of those things with increasing skill, but imitation is not the same as authenticity.
When nearly six out of every ten videos a new user watches are AI-generated, the question is no longer whether there is AI waste on TikTok. The question is whether it has become a defining characteristic of the platform.
