As the supreme leader of TV viewing charts for the past three years, you would think that YouTube’s strategy would be a blueprint for anyone connected to the media and entertainment industry—creative, technical, or otherwise.
Yet a blogpost from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, laying out a self-gratifying teaser trailer for what’s coming to YouTube in 2026, has gone down like a lead balloon.
That balloon is inflated with a highly volatile genre of content widely known as “AI slop”—which has rapidly ascended YouTube Shorts into the stratosphere.
Buried at the bottom of Mohan’s blogpost is a section on managing AI slop, which makes everything that was said before reek of double standards—not just about the threat to creative industries but with the threat of AI-generated content spreading misinformation.
With more than 1 million channels using YouTube’s AI creation tools daily in December 2025,
YouTube is profiting massively from the proliferation of AI slop, and the company’s so-called anti-AI slop campaign is little more than a convenient smokescreen.
Mohan claims YouTube is “actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combatting spam and clickbait, and reducing the spread of low quality, repetitive content.”
He compares the advent of AI slop to previously unpopular formats like watching other people play video games, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos, which are now both popular content formats. By putting AI slop in the same bracket, Mohan is a hypocrite—giving little confidence in YouTube’s ability to police AI-generated content.
YouTube Shorts now averages 200 billion daily views, and this year will see YouTube integrating different formats directly into the short-form vertical video feed to pump up that figure. One of YouTube’s forthcoming AI-powered features will allow users to create Shorts using their own likeness.
In an era of dangerous deep fakes, this is a potentially serious vector for misuse.
This implies YouTube will allow you to generate video content based on previous video content or possibly still images. Mohan did not provide examples, but this could go beyond AI-generated avatars to full motion replication or even voice cloning. If a malicious actor hijacks and successfully copies these AI-generated digital likenesses, then impersonations of celebrities, influencers, or your average Joe, could become widespread—with serious implications.
And those implications go beyond YouTube itself. As Faultline warned recently, the BBC’s decision to jump into bed with YouTube raises concerns over the misuse of BBC content.
Another of YouTube’s forthcoming features will see image posts being integrated into the Shorts feed, where still images will presumably sit in a carousel alongside video-first Shorts content.
This is a direct swipe at Instagram, and signals YouTube’s ambitions for Shorts to become more of a multi-format social feed.
Mohan claims integrating still images will make it easier for viewers of YouTube Shorts to stay connected with their favourite creators.
YouTube will also be adding the ability to link to a brand’s site in YouTube Shorts content, or to swap out a branded segment once a deal concludes, to drive advertising revenue.
Direct linking in Shorts is arguably more significant than taking on Instagram with image posts, because for the first time it brings shoppable content to Shorts, similar to the conversion-driven content that has been highly lucrative for TikTok and Instagram.
YouTube is late to the party here with product links and in-feed shopping, yet its sheer reach could soon see these new features making a major material impact on advertising revenues.
The ability to then replace a branded segment after a deal ends allows content to stay relevant once a sponsored post expires. Creators on YouTube Shorts can then resell the same slot to a new advertiser without remaking any content, not only saving time for creators but creating long-term ad inventory inside Shorts.
These changes signal that YouTube plans to transform Shorts into a more serious revenue stream this year, where previously ad revenue options were limited in Shorts as a viewer-first experience.
Do not be fooled though, as any apparent “management” of AI slop will play second fiddle to YouTube’s vertical video growth ambitions.
This comes just a few months after Meta expanded Vibes, its TikTok-like feed of AI-generated short videos, into Europe. This marked the first all-AI-generated social media application from Big Tech, allowing users to remix, co-create, and share entirely AI-made clips.
The timing was odd, given Meta’s earlier focus on “authentic storytelling” and cracking down on low-quality AI content, just as YouTube is now claiming to do.