YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says the platform is preparing to step up enforcement against low-quality AI-generated content as Shorts continues to scale at a pace rarely seen in media history.
In an interview with YouTube liaison Rene Ritchie, Mohan says Shorts is now generating hundreds of billions of views per day, making it one of the fastest-growing formats on the platform and a major focus of investment heading into this year.
“Shorts is 200 billion views a day. That continues to be an incredibly fast-growing format on YouTube, and it’s an area that you’ll see further investment from us in 2026. [It] continues to be an area of strength and investment for us.”
As Shorts and AI-assisted creation accelerate, Mohan says YouTube’s strategy rests on a three-part approach centered on transparency, enforcement and quality control, with a particular focus on AI slop.
“First, we are going to continue to lean into transparency. Any content, whether it’s using AI tools or not, is subject to our community guidelines, including guidelines around deception and fake content. So that will continue, and it’s up to us to continue to enforce that at scale. We have a track record of doing that. We’re going to continue to do that, continue to invest in that area.
And then also focus on the proliferation of low-quality content, what some people refer to as AI slop. And there, we want to make sure that our recommendation systems can deal with it. And we’re going to treat it based on our track record of being able to do that around things like clickbait, low-quality, repetitive content. You should expect to see a lot more investment from YouTube, building on what we’ve been doing over the last couple of years, going into 2026.”
The platform’s efforts to combat low-quality content come after a study found that about 33% of YouTube Shorts cycled in a user’s feed are either AI slop or brainrot content.
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