Snapchat will no longer recommend AI-generated videos on Spotlight

Snapchat will no longer recommend wholly AI-generated videos on its Spotlight feed. The change, effective this month, updates the platform’s recommendation systems to prioritise what the company calls “authentic, human-made content.” Users can still upload AI-generated videos, but those videos will no longer be surfaced to people who do not already follow the creator.

The move is an escalation of a policy Snap outlined in April under the banner “Still Spotlight, But Still Real,” which signalled that the platform would begin favouring original content. The company says the number of unique Spotlight contributors globally has grown more than 120 percent compared to last year, a figure it is framing as evidence that human creators are already choosing the platform.

Snap drew a deliberate line between AI as a replacement and AI as a tool. Content that has been enhanced or edited using Snapchat’s own AI creative features will remain eligible for recommendation, and those posts will carry transparency indicators showing that AI was involved. The distinction is between a video made entirely by a machine and one where a human used AI to sharpen the edit.

The announcement arrives in the middle of a broader platform revolt against AI slop. LinkedIn added a “seems like AI slop” reporting button last week and now suppresses generic AI-generated posts from recommendations, while YouTube has cut payouts for template-made AI videos. Substack partnered with Pangram to detect AI-written content, with its CEO explicitly saying the company built the feature because it did not want to become LinkedIn.

The scale of the problem helps explain the urgency. A Kapwing study published in June found that nearly 60 percent of TikTok videos shown to new accounts were AI slop, roughly three times the rate on YouTube Shorts, while researchers estimated that 41 percent of long-form LinkedIn posts were likely AI-generated. The flood has reached a point where platforms risk losing the human creators who made them worth visiting in the first place.

Snap acknowledged the limits of its own approach. “No detection system is perfect,” the company said, “but our goal is simple: keep Spotlight a place where authentic creativity has the best opportunity to be discovered.” The caveat is significant because LinkedIn’s own AI detection system claims 94 percent accuracy but has shared no data on false positives, and text-based AI content remains harder to fingerprint than images or video.

The timing is not accidental. The transparency provisions of the EU AI Act took effect on 2 August, requiring makers of generative AI systems to mark their output as artificial and anyone publishing deepfakes or AI-written text on public-interest topics to label it visibly, with fines reaching 15 million euros or three percent of worldwide turnover. Snap’s voluntary move lands just as the regulatory floor rises beneath it.

Spotlight had more than 500 million monthly active users in the first quarter of 2026, with time spent on the feature up 175 percent year over year, according to Snap’s earnings report. Those are the numbers of a feed worth protecting. Whether suppressing AI content will keep human creators posting, or simply push the AI-generated material to platforms with looser rules, is the question every company making this bet is now trying to answer.