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YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more have ramped up content authentication efforts over the last year, so why can’t we filter out AI yet?
Online platforms could prove whether AI labels work by giving us a filter option, but then they’d have to face reality.
It’s almost impossible to avoid seeing AI-generated content online, but it doesn’t have to be this way. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more have ramped up content authentication efforts over the last year, with many now automatically applying labels to distinguish AI-generated images, videos, and music from those made by real, human creators.
That’s all very well and good if we’re just stumbling across labeled content at random, but you know what would be better? Letting us filter out the AI slop.
Current labeling efforts haven’t meaningfully changed how content is presented online. You may notice that some TikTok or YouTube videos in your feeds now have AI disclosures in the description, or information labels overlaid onto the clip itself. Meta takes a similar approach by applying “AI info” labels to images on Facebook and Instagram that carry identifying AI metadata or voluntary disclosures from the creators.
But if you want to actually avoid seeing anything tagged with such labels — which is justifiable, given the brain rot it induces on top of the ethical and environmental concerns around generative AI — it’s actually incredibly difficult to do so. A filter would easily solve this. All we need is an “AI” checkbox to toggle.
I reached out to Meta, Google, TikTok, and Spotify to ask if they have plans to let users filter the various content they’ve been authenticating with AI labeling systems. TikTok and Spotify never responded, and Google said it had nothing to share. Meta didn’t provide an attributable comment. But to summarize, none of these companies said “yes.”