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

"Stop the SlopEnglish for swill or pig feed. Online the word stands for machine-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 the rebuild of his most important feed on 31 July. Videos generated entirely by artificial intelligence are no longer recommended on Snapchat.

They are not banned. Anyone who uploads such clips may carry on. Only users who already follow the account will get to see them.

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. The company says it wants to keep rewarding those who bring an original perspective and tell a personal story.

The exception is notable. Anyone who edits a video with Snapchat's own AI tools stays in the recommendation system. Those posts merely carry a visible indicator that a machine was involved.

Four platforms were faster than Snapchat

Snap did not lead the way, it followed. Four other platforms had done the same since the middle of July.

YouTube had already renamed its monetisation rules on 16 July. "Repetitious content" became "inauthentic content". Since then the term explicitly covers videos that someone turns out in series 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 it emerged that Spotify had removed more than 75 million tracks that looked like spam. Sam Duboff, responsible there for global artist marketing and policy, conceded that the line between AI music and the rest is blurring. The platform takes in around 100,000 new tracks a day, according to the company.

On 30 July LinkedIn introduced a report button. It reads "Seems like AI slop." LinkedIn uses the reports to train its detection and to cut the reach of flagged posts. Anyone reported often will see it in their own analytics.

AI slop is a top priority for all of them, said Hari Srinivasan, the chief product officer of LinkedIn. They really care about it.

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

A day after Spotify, the French music service Deezer published figures. They explain why the platforms are in 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.

So the rise does not show up in the streams. Deezer helps that along, though, and takes detected AI tracks out of its own recommendations and editorial playlists.

A second figure from the same report shows what happens where they are streamed anyway. Up to 85 per cent of those streams were fraudulent in 2025. Where the counters are running, often no human is listening at all.

The company wants to concentrate on the music that fans actually love, said Alexis Lanternier, the chief executive of Deezer.

No platform bans AI

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

Snapchat allows them explicitly. Deezer detects AI tracks with an accuracy of 99.8 per cent by its own account, but takes them only out of recommendations and editorial playlists, not out of the catalogue.

LinkedIn shows the difference 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 and leaves the writer's voice alone.

So LinkedIn has decided to leave its users the tool and take away the replacement.

Matt Halprin, in charge of trust and safety at YouTube, described the difference like this: the same tool that lets one person make great videos and lift their creativity lets another turn out very similar videos very fast. The second case, he said, is content farming, and that is exactly what they do not want.

So the dividing line does not run between human and machine. It runs between tool and replacement.

Creativity has just become scarce

For a long time the public question was whether artificial intelligence replaces creative people. Five companies answered it in a good two weeks, not with a statement but with their recommendation systems.

I take that to be the turning point.

The more alike content becomes, the more real creativity is worth. That is not certain, but the reasoning is close at hand: whatever exists in abundance becomes cheap. And since this July five platforms have been making everything else easier to find.

Against that stands an objection which is just as plausible. What becomes scarce may not be creativity at all, but distribution. Whoever already has reach will win the new sorting too, regardless of how good the work is.

That cannot be ruled out, and the platforms decide it themselves. Snapchat, YouTube and LinkedIn determine with their recommendation systems whose work ends up on top. Betting on quality winning through means betting that five corporations will recognise it.

Snap offers a figure of its own that should be read with care. It comes from inside the company and it is older than the new rule. Worldwide, more than twice as many people publish their own videos on Snapchat as a year ago.

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.

The gain is not the time saved. It is the ideas there was never time for.

Anyone who can play through three routes takes the best of three. Anyone who can play through twelve gets to the twelfth. That is a different job from typing faster.

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.