"Stop the Slop": five platforms move against pure AI content.

"Stop the SlopEnglish for swill or pig feed. Online the word stands for AI-made content turned out in bulk that serves nobody.!" With those three words Evan SpiegelCo-founder and chief executive of Snap, the company behind Snapchat. He has led the company since it was founded., the chief executive of Snap, announced on 31 July that he was rebuilding his most important feed. Snapchat no longer recommends videos that come entirely from an artificial intelligence.

They are not banned. Anyone who uploads such clips can carry on doing so. They only reach the people who already follow the account.

Snap gives this reason: low-quality, repetitive AI content is becoming ever more common across the internet. SpotlightSnapchat's public video feed. Unlike messages to friends it shows short videos from strangers, picked by a recommendation system., the app's public video feed, should remain a place where people discover real creativity from real people.

There is one exception. Anyone who edits a video with Snapchat's own AI tools still gets recommended. Those posts merely carry a visible indicator that an AI was involved.

Four platforms were faster than Snapchat

Snap was not the first. Four other platforms had already decided the same thing since the middle of July.

I take that to be the turning point.

YouTube had already renamed its monetisation rules on 16 July. "Repetitious content" became "inauthentic content". Since then the term explicitly covers videos that someone mass-produces with artificial intelligence, computer graphics or templates. Anyone who does that no longer earns money from the Partner ProgrammeThe programme through which YouTube shares its advertising revenue with creators. Without it you can still upload videos, but you earn nothing from them..

Four days later Spotify put a number on it. The service has deleted more than 75 million tracks it took for spam. Around 100,000 new tracks arrive there every day, by the company's own account.

On 30 July LinkedIn introduced a report button. It reads "Seems like AI slop." Anyone who clicks it helps LinkedIn spot such posts by itself in future. Flagged posts get less reach.

90,000 AI songs a day, three per cent of streams

A day after Spotify, the French music service Deezer published figures of its own. They explain why the platforms are in such a hurry.

In June more than half of all newly uploaded tracks there came from an artificial intelligence, on average around 90,000 tracks a day. In April it was 44 per cent and 75,000 tracks.

This music is barely played. It accounts for one to three per cent of all tracks streamed.

Deezer makes sure it stays that way, though. It keeps detected AI tracks out of its recommendations and out of its editorial playlists.

And where those tracks do get streamed, often nobody is listening at all. Up to 85 per cent of those streams were fraudulent in 2025, according to the same report.

No platform bans AI

None of the five platforms bans artificial intelligence. Snapchat even offers tools of its own.

LinkedIn shows this most clearly on its own product. On 30 July it dropped "Enhance your post", the feature that rewrote a post. In its place there is now a proofreading tool. It corrects grammar and spelling. It leaves the writer's voice alone.

So LinkedIn still helps with the writing. The writing itself is up to you.

The question for the platforms is not whether an AI was involved. It is whether the AI did the work.

Creativity has just become scarce

For years people argued about whether artificial intelligence replaces creative work. Five companies answered in a good two weeks, by rebuilding their recommendation systems.

When everything starts to look the same, whatever is your own is worth more. There is no proving that. But whatever exists in abundance becomes cheap. And since this July, five large platforms sort in a way that makes the exceptions easier to find.

There is an equally plausible objection. What becomes scarce may not be creativity at all, but distribution. Whoever already has reach will come out on top of the new sorting as well, no matter how good the work is.

That cannot be ruled out. Anyone betting on quality is in the end relying on five corporations to recognise it.

Artificial intelligence and creativity go hand in hand for me, as a tool and not as a replacement. Used properly, that tool multiplies your own creativity.

It saves time as well. What matters more are the ideas there was never time for.

Anyone who can try three ideas takes the best of three. Anyone who can try twelve gets to the twelfth in the first place.

For everyone with something of their own to say, that is good news: an idea of your own has not been worth this much for a long time.