A fresh YouTube account in late 2025. A researcher at Kapwing creates one, sits back, and records the first 500 videos the algorithm serves up. Roughly a third of those clips were identified as AI-generated brainrot, showing how fast the machine takes over a new feed. That's not a glitch. That's the product working exactly as designed.
I have been daily-driving AI video tools for a week, and I will be honest with you: the output is genuinely impressive. In one demonstration, Sora produced a one-minute sequence of a Tokyo street scene, complete with moving cars, glowing neon, and pedestrians crossing, with impressive handling of depth, motion, and design. Runway Gen-4 Turbo can nail painterly aesthetics, surreal compositions, stop-motion feels. Kling 3.0 handles camera control like a director who actually studied film. The technical story is real. The creative story is a disaster.
Is it worth it? Let us talk.
The AI video market is projected to hit $18.6 billion globally by end of 2026, up from $5.1 billion in 2023. Enterprise spending on AI video platforms grew 127% year-over-year in 2025. That is a staggering amount of money going into tools that, by every observable metric, are producing a staggering amount of nothing. Mentions of "AI slop" across the internet increased ninefold from 2024, with negative sentiment hitting a high of 54% in October. Merriam-Webster even named "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year. We are spending billions of dollars to make people hate the internet more.
The reason this keeps happening is not complicated. The tools solved the wrong problem. Getting footage to look expensive used to require cameras, lighting, locations, and crews. AI eliminated all of that. Top creators are now producing 200 to 300 videos monthly as solo operations with AI handling production. That is not creativity. That is a content assembly line. The people running it are mostly optimizing for the algorithm, not for you.
When Friction Kept the Garbage Out
Here is the thing nobody wants to say: the old friction had a purpose. It cost real money to make a video worth watching. That cost filtered out everyone who had nothing to say. When the cost collapses to nearly zero, you get exactly what you would expect. "It's empty calories in a way because you start watching it because it gives you something that's kind of interesting but is kind of soulless." That quote is from a Washington Post reporter, and I cannot improve on it.
More than 20% of videos suggested to first-time users are low-quality, AI-generated clips designed primarily to attract views. Many target children through bright animations, while others rely on surreal scenes featuring anthropomorphic animals; some use AI to produce "uncanny" depictions of natural disasters paired with calming background music. The researchers said such videos are designed to maximize watch time and advertising revenue. One creator reportedly made close to $1,000 in four days from an AI video of an influencer eating glass fruit. The incentive structure is absolutely working. For engagement farming. Not for you.
The audiences know it too. Conversations about slop in art and culture surged 125% in 2025. Audiences are quick to reject work that feels soulless, especially when they suspect that humans had little to no part in the creation process. Whether it's scrolling past, blocking, or calling out videos that "look like AI," consumers are showing that they want content with soul. Some creators are even adding caveats to their captions, tagging posts as "not AI" to reassure their followers. Think about that for a second. "Not AI" has become a selling point. We have achieved the opposite of what everyone promised.
The Tool Was Never the Missing Ingredient
Devon would tell you this is a training data problem. Audrey would tell you it is a labor displacement crisis. They are both partially right and both missing the actual issue, which is simpler: AI video quality is not the moat anymore. Creative direction is. As generation capabilities reach near-parity across platforms, the competitive advantage has shifted from what AI can create to how effectively creators direct it.
I will admit one uncomfortable thing here. The truly creative AI work does exist. It is just rare, and it requires a person behind it with something to actually say. The problem is the ratio. The tools evolved, but as a result, our feeds are now full of senseless material, and we must now question everything we see, read, or hear to determine if it's real or AI. That erosion of trust is a real cost that does not show up on anyone's ROI dashboard.
The verdict: AI video tools are genuinely capable and, for specific use cases, worth whatever subscription you pay. If you need B-roll, product demos, or explainers, they deliver. But the idea that lowering the barrier to production would unlock a creativity explosion has been thoroughly disproven. Generic AI video floods every platform, and audiences scroll past content that feels automated or soulless. The tools belong to those who use AI as a precision instrument, not a content firehose. The problem was never that making video was too hard. It was that having something worth saying was always the hard part. Cheaper cameras never fixed that. Neither will this.
