Advocacy groups urge YouTube to protect kids from ‘AI slop’ videos – WRAL

Advocacy groups and experts condemned YouTube for serving up low-quality artificial intelligence-generated videos to its most vulnerable audience: children. Posted 4/1/2026, 10:03:12 AM FILE – The icons for the YouTube Kids and YouTube apps are displayed on a smartphone in New York on April 25, 2018. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File) By KAITLYN HUAMANI — AP Technology Writer Advocacy groups and experts condemned YouTube for serving up low-quality artificial intelligence-generated videos to its most vulnerable audience: children. In a letter to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of YouTube’s parent company Google, children’s advocacy group Fairplay expresses “serious concern” about the spread of AI-generated videos on both YouTube and YouTube Kids. The letter, which was sent on Wednesday morning, was signed by more than 200 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators. “This ’ AI slop ’ harms children’s development by distorting their sense of reality, overwhelming their learning processes and hijacking their attention, thereby extending time online and displacing offline activities necessary for their healthy development,” the letter reads. “These harms are particularly acute for young children.” The letter calls on YouTube to clearly label all AI-generated content and ban any AI-generated content on
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