AI-Generated Algorithmic Virality

There is a growing discussion about social media feeds being increasingly filled with AI-generated content. Due to its visual plausibility, low cost, and fast production speed, AI-generated content is said to be highly effective in "gaming the algorithm" and going viral. Popularly referred to as "AI slop," this phenomenon arguably leads to the presence of sloppy and potentially deceptive content at a scale unseen before. This investigation offers a systematic analysis of AI-generated content and its labelling in TikTok's and Instagram's search results across 13 hashtags (see Appendix) in three European countries (Spain, Germany, and Poland) over the course of June 2025. We manually annotated and analyzed the 30 top search results on political (#trump, #zelensky, #pope) and broader topics (e.g.,#health, #history) to understand the relation between synthetic (content that is partially or entirely made using generative AI) and non-synthetic content across languages and countries. We then explored the emerging phenomenon of accounts producing generative AI content at scale by analyzing 153 accounts and proposing a new categorization schema of what we termed Agentic AI Accounts. Our main findings are: