I told you that AI slop was coming for your YouTube content, and did you believe me? I don’t know, maybe you did, but if you didn’t believe before, you certainly will now. According to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who gave a keynote at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Wednesday, YouTube is getting a new tool that generates Shorts from “scratch.” By scratch, I mean with the help of Google’s recently unveiled Veo 3 AI generator. That’s right, a one-stop shop for AI slop is incoming, which should be great if you like not ever knowing what’s real or fake.
Mohan, like many executives in tech and otherwise, is decidedly very excited about the potential for AI to shake up the game. Here’s what he said during his keynote, per the Hollywood Reporter.
“Communities will continue to surprise us with the power of their collective fandom. And cutting-edge AI technology will push the limits of human creativity. My biggest bet is that YouTube will continue to be the stage where it all happens. Where anyone with a story to share can turn their dream into a career… and anyone with a voice can bring people together and change the world.”
Sure, that’s one possibility, I guess. The other possibility? A new and heaping mountain of junk content that neither enriches your general selection of YouTube fodder nor protects the already embattled line between reality and fiction. I hate to be the resident slippery slope guy, but how far are we really going to take this? According to Mohan, pretty freakin’ far. “The possibilities with AI are limitless,” Mohan said during the keynote. “A lot can change in a generation. Entertainment itself has changed more in the last two decades than any other time in history. Creators led this revolution.”
people are using veo3 to bring history to life in the form of vlogs 🤣
via HistoryVisualizedbyAI on YouTube pic.twitter.com/C5OJCbyTBJ
— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) June 15, 2025
It’s a little ironic to extol the creator-led content revolution on one hand and introduce a watershed tool that helps vacuum up all of their content and regurgitate it into AI slop on the other, but hey, who’s counting? Oh, that’s right, Hollywood is. As noted by the Hollywood Reporter, YouTube has already struck a deal with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) that gives artists and athletes control over their likeness. But that’s just some artists who are okay with capitulating to the apparent tsunami of video generation. Hundreds of other actors have already voiced their concerns over the potential for AI to ruin their careers and plunder their intellectual property. As a result, they’ve called for regulation on generative AI and its implementation. You may have gathered from the simple fact of my writing these words right now that those cries for a legal framework haven’t really gone anywhere. They may never, to be honest, which brings me back to YouTube’s plans for a future AI slop faucet.
Here we are, on the precipice of real and fake, looking out at the horizon of God knows what, waiting for the deluge of AI slop to send us kicking and screaming into the ravine of existential AI pain. I’m not saying YouTube’s generative shorts are going to be the lynchpin in that frankly depressing, slop-filled future, but there’s no denying it’s a nod in a sloppy direction. I guess we may as well get used to it. I mean, it can’t get any worse than MrBeast, right? Right?
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