YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, causing the animation channel to suffer its worst-performing upload since 2013. “It turned out that YouTube’s automatic AI detection tools wrongly think that our very much human-made videos are AI Slop,” Kurzgesagt explained. “If YouTube detects AI content as slop, which we’ve already well established Kurzgesagt isn’t, it will choke the channel,” vidIQ said. In the comments, dozens of other creators expressed fear that they too had been targeted by YouTube’s AI detector and had their reach “completely dead.” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan previously vowed to combat low-quality AI content after a report found 21% of videos recommended to new users were AI slop.