For a report published in June 2026, the video company Kapwing opened a brand-new TikTok account and logged the first 500 videos its For You feed served. By Kapwing's count, 59% of them were AI slop. Its definition is "careless, low-quality content generated using automatic computer applications and distributed to farm views and subscriptions or sway political opinion." An earlier test on YouTube put the share of Shorts at 21%, and among 15,000 of the world's top trending channels it found 278 that posted nothing but AI slop.
Kapwing sells video software and each test used a single account, so hold the exact percentages loosely. Anyone who has opened a short-video app this year can vouch for the direction.
If you film real places for a living, the flood works in your favour. The platforms and the audience are both pushing back on it, and what they're pushing toward is what a local creator already does.
The platforms are tightening up
The apps that host your content have started treating mass-produced AI video as a problem to manage.
- YouTube renamed its "repetitious content" monetization policy to "inauthentic content" in July 2025. The policy now rules out "AI-generated content made with generic or unoriginal templates giving the impression of mass production without adding the creator's original, authentic insights or perspective."
- TikTok started testing a setting in November 2025 that lets people choose how much AI-generated content shows up in For You.
- Instagram said on August 31, 2026 that profiles featuring an AI-generated person that don't label themselves may see limits to their reach. Its reasoning was blunt: "People don't like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated."
The splashiest AI video app of 2025 didn't last, either. OpenAI's Sora peaked at about 3.3 million downloads a month in November 2025, fell to 1.1 million in February, and was shut down in March 2026, according to Appfigures data reported by TechCrunch.
Canadians trust people more
The clearest Canadian numbers come from a survey of 2,242 Canadians that Caddle ran for Ad Standards in October 2025.
When only a quarter of people trust themselves to spot AI, the signals they can check count for more: a face they've seen before, a street they recognize, a place they could walk to tomorrow.
You can see the same preference in what Canadians want from creators in general. In Leger's 2026 DGTL study, fielded in spring 2025, 79% of Canadians who follow creators said they prefer personal or spontaneous content to brand partnership content, and 66% prefer "people like me" over people who make them dream. South of the border and in the U.K., Billion Dollar Boy found that only 26% of consumers prefer AI-generated creator content, down from 60% in 2023.
The same Billion Dollar Boy research also found 76% of consumers trust virtual influencers' product recommendations, so the picture isn't uniform. For a local business, the question is narrower anyway. Can this person get someone to come in?
What AI can't fake
An AI clip can show a perfect latte, but it has never tasted one. Ad Standards makes the same point in its disclosure guidelines, telling brands that an AI-generated influencer shouldn't give a testimonial about something "it cannot experience (i.e. this food sure tastes great!)."
As a local creator you can do everything that sentence rules out. You can:
- Show the real room, the real lineup and the person behind the counter
- Say how long you waited and what you'd order next time
- Tell a follower where to park
- Come back next month when the menu changes and film it again
That's the information a follower uses to decide whether to go, and none of it can be generated.
How to lean into it
Film what only you could film. Your hands, your table, your walk from the subway. Get your face into at least part of the video, since a voice-over on generic B-roll is easy to mistake for AI.
Be specific about place. Name the street, the neighbourhood and the dish. Specifics are hard to fake and easy for your followers to check.
Label honestly. If you use AI to edit or generate part of a post, say so; our guide to AI disclosure covers the hashtags, and a clear label costs you far less than a follower who feels tricked.
Get paid for results. Brands paying for real visits want to know people actually came in. On Onlure, local businesses book creators for campaigns that count the customers each creator sends, and the seven creators in World Soccer Party's campaign drove 173 walk-ins.
