YouTube clarifies inauthentic content policy with three monetization categories

The updated guidance, rolled out on July 16, affects all YouTube Partner Program members. Matt Halprin, vice president of trust and safety, set out the categories in a Creator Insider video, the company's official channel for creator updates. "AI can actually allow people to make a lot of videos," Halprin said. "Sometimes those videos are great, and it really enhances creativity."

The three categories

Halprin said the first category covers generic, repetitive or template-based video, including material that can be made easily with AI, computer-generated imagery or templates with little variation from upload to upload. Tutorial videos could fall under the policy if they reproduce content already prevalent on the platform instead of offering something original, he said.

He said the second category covers "off-putting" content designed to be distressing or emotionally manipulative to chase views. His example was a channel that shows an animal in distress and then a rescue. Channels dedicated to that content will be removed from the Partner Program regardless of whether the footage is AI-generated. Yahoo Tech reported that news reports, documentaries, fictional series and other substantive work can still cover tragedy, violence or distress when the material serves a larger story. Gizmodo said the rule will likely cause issues for channels that discuss the news.

The third category targets AI personas, which TechCrunch described as representations of real people made with AI, used to discuss sensitive topics such as healthcare, finance, law and politics. Yahoo Tech cited examples of an AI-generated doctor diagnosing symptoms and an AI-generated podcast host recommending investments. YouTube's concern is that viewers might mistake the characters for credible human experts. Halprin said any channel with too much of any of the three types will not be able to monetize.

Clarification, not a new policy

A YouTube spokesperson told Business Insider the policy is not new. It is a clarification of the company's long-standing "inauthentic content" policy, intended to reduce ambiguity for creators who had been demonetized for repetitive, low-effort or emotionally manipulative videos. YouTube first moved against mass-produced and repetitive video under the inauthentic label in 2025, when it announced it was stemming revenue from such content.

How large the AI slop problem is

Kapwing created a new YouTube account and analyzed the first 500 Shorts the platform recommended. It classified 104, or 21%, as "AI slop"; another 165, or 33%, fell into a broader "brainrot" category that includes AI slop and other low-quality, engagement-optimized content. The 21% figure is for the first 500 Shorts served to a new account, not all YouTube videos.

In a separate sample, Kapwing examined 15,000 popular channels and identified 278 that published nothing but AI-generated content. Those channels had 63 billion views, 221 million subscribers and an estimated $117 million in annual ad revenue as of October 2025. YouTube said the findings did not necessarily reflect the platform as a whole; it terminated one channel identified in the study and removed several others from its monetization programs, Yahoo Tech reported.

Why the categories matter to YouTube's ad business

The Partner Program pays creators through advertising and subscriptions. YouTube now generates more ad revenue than rival streamers and has overtaken Netflix in average daily views worldwide, TechCrunch reported. Business Insider reported that YouTube has spent years pitching itself to advertisers as television's future, and that a surge of AI-generated spam threatens that message. In January 2026, the platform removed more than a dozen popular channels that had amassed millions of views with AI-generated videos featuring cats and Jesus. Chief executive Neal Mohan used the term "AI slop" in his January 2026 annual letter and pledged to build on the platform's spam and clickbait detection systems.