A new study shows a shocking amount of bad AI content on TikTok. The study comes from Kapwing, a video editing platform. It found that 59% of videos on new TikTok accounts are made by AI. This is three times more than on YouTube.
Kapwing made new accounts on TikTok and YouTube. They looked at the first 500 videos shown. On TikTok, 294 out of 500 videos were made by AI. On YouTube, only 104 out of 500 videos were AI. This means YouTube has about 21% AI content.
This problem is big. By November, TikTok already marked 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated. Kapwing also checked over 10,000 TikTok videos in 20 different categories. This gave them a clearer picture of where this content is found.
Children's content had the most AI. About 57% of 2,000 videos in this category were made by AI. The hashtag "#cartoonkids" was the worst. Almost all 97 out of 100 videos were AI-made.
Science, education, health, and history categories also had a lot of AI content. Between 33% and 35% of videos in these areas were low-quality AI. These categories often use cartoons and voiceovers. They don't often show real people.
Fashion, music, and fitness categories had very little AI content. Less than 2% of videos in these areas used AI. This is likely because these videos need real people on camera.
TikTok has tools to help users see less AI content. But this study shows that much of the default content is still low-quality AI. Users still need to figure out what is good content and what is bad.