Snapchat has now jumped on the bandwagon of other social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Substack and YouTube, in its fight against fake writing, images and videos that are completely generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Such content, commonly called “AI slop”, has proliferated online as the tech industry has raced to create a greater number of easier-to-use generative AI tools that can create anything from essays to realistic videos.

In a statement Friday, Snap, the company behind Snapchat, announced it would no longer recommend “wholly AI-generated videos” in its popular Spotlight feed, but rather move toward “authentic, human-made content.”

In the two weeks since then, YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack have announced similar moves.

However, Snap didn’t go so far as to attempt to ban all content created with AI-generated text from Snapchat. It also has its own AI tools to edit and pretend to alter content, and so AI “enhanced or edited” content will still be part of its recommendations to users.

But Snap admitted that while all-AI-generated content is “low-quality,” “repetitive,” and generally “the kind of content that Snapchat doesn’t want you to be seeing,” they are not strictly what Snapchat users want to see.

The platforms that helped usher in the generative AI boom are now trying to clean up the mess without disowning the technology behind it, as LinkedIn and Snap became the latest companies to take aim at low-quality, mass-produced AI content, often referred to as “AI slop” online.…

— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 10, 2026

New studies of how people react to AI-generated descriptions indicate that users are more likely to agree with these descriptions.

Additionally, as more fake AI-generated content appears in a social media feed, people will become less likely to believe that content in their online feeds is authentic, another survey found.

Targeting ‘AI slop’

As Chris Best, co-founder of Substack, said last week, “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to trust what is genuine online.”

When announcing the new tool, Best referenced other studies that have found as much as 40% of social media writing to be fake or AI-generated.

“Platforms that encourage fakeness will result in a race to the bottom,” Best said.

This week, LinkedIn has added a button to its social media site that lets anyone flag a post or comment that looks like it was created by an AI.

All of us have a high priority of AI slop, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, Hari Srinivasan, wrote on the platform.

He claims that the platform had “blocked billions” of AI-generated comments in the past couple of months alone.

“The number of automated comment attempts caught rose to hundreds of thousands every day,” Srinivasan said.

Like Snap, LinkedIn said it is not rejecting the use of AI entirely, and users who use AI tools to “refine” their posts should not get caught up in efforts to combat AI slop.

Nonetheless, LinkedIn is removing an automated prompt that would show up for users writing a post offering to “enhance” it through the use of AI. It will be returned to its basic proofreading functions.

YouTube, the video platform owned by Google, also made changes to its policies regarding what type of content is eligible for monetisation for creators this month.

Research from last year found scores of channels on YouTube that were solely AI-generated content, many of which had millions of subscribers and some of which made millions of dollars in revenue.

In an effort to discourage YouTube from filling up with what the platform calls “inauthentic content”, earlier this month the site broke down into three categories the kind of videos that will not be allowed to make money through it: generic, repetitive, or template-based.

The styles of content come much more easily and in a much shorter time with the use of generative AI tools.

In an interview on the new rules, YouTube’s trust and safety chief Matt Halprin said people are using AI tools more to generate fake and low-quality videos than to help them with their content.

“But the same technology, really, makes for great stuff,” Halprin said.

But “it also allows for content farming,” which is “the stuff that we don’t want to have,” he said.