Tony Wang10 min read'This Is AI': What TikTok Comments Say vs TikTok's Own AI Label
TikTok product videos with an AI label draw 13x more 'this is AI' comments, yet 87% of videos viewers call AI carry no label. From 784K comments.
TikTok says it has labeled more than 3 billion videos as AI-generated. Viewers are running their own check in the comments, one "this is AI" at a time. We compared the two on 17,730 shopping and product videos: what people say is AI, and what TikTok actually labels. They agree on direction and disagree on almost every individual video.
"This is AI" went from almost never to 1 in 740 comments
For the first years of this corpus, nobody asked. The first AI comments appear in 2024, and the rate climbs every half-year after mid-2025:
| Comment written | Audience comments | AI comments | Per 10,000 | Per 10,000, jokes excluded | Videos with any AI comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-2023 | 28,142 | 0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0% |
| 2024 H1 | 19,949 | 2 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 0.33% |
| 2024 H2 | 17,025 | 1 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 0.11% |
| 2025 H1 | 39,477 | 5 | 1.3 | 1.3 | 0.28% |
| 2025 H2 | 61,493 | 35 | 5.7 | 4.6 | 0.60% |
| 2026 H1 | 245,166 | 227 | 9.3 | 7.6 | 1.60% |
| 2026 H2 | 367,196 | 495 | 13.5 | 12.1 | 1.85% |
"Jokes" are comments like "my hair said it's AI" or "for my mental health this is AI". Our joke filter flags 13% of AI comments. It misses some variants, and in the hand-read sample jokes were closer to one in six. Removing the flagged jokes leaves the same climb. The rise is not one viral video either: the 765 comments come from 764 accounts across 339 videos, the single busiest video holds 6.7% of them, and dropping the ten busiest videos still leaves 9.8 per 10,000 in the second half of 2026.
The most useful check is which videos draw the doubt. Grouped by when the video was posted and when the comment was written:
| Video posted | Comment written | Comments | Per 10,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 2024 | 33,096 | 0.6 |
| 2024 | 2025 | 7,722 | 0.0 |
| 2024 | 2026 | 3,501 | 0.0 |
| 2025 | 2025 | 89,935 | 4.4 |
| 2025 | 2026 | 25,942 | 7.3 |
| 2026 | 2026 | 581,200 | 12.1 |
Viewers are not going back through old videos with new suspicion. Across every video posted before 2025, comments written in 2025 and 2026 contain exactly one AI comment out of 16,255. The doubt attaches to new videos, and it has also grown on the same set of videos: comments on 2025 videos went from 4.4 per 10,000 in 2025 to 7.3 in 2026.
Who says it, and where
Spanish speakers raise it far more often. Spanish is 6.6% of audience comments and 26.8% of AI comments ("es IA", "se nota que es IA"). French (7.5%) and Vietnamese (4.2%) are also over-represented; English is 75.3% of comments and 61.4% of AI comments.
Hair and pet videos draw the most. In 2026 the rate is highest in pet products and hair styling tools, and hair tools rose the fastest:
| Category | 2025 | 2026 | AI comments in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pet products | 21.9 | 29.3 | 162 |
| Hair styling tools | 3.8 | 25.5 | 183 |
| Home workout equipment | 0.0 | 12.3 | 58 |
| Cleaning tools | 0.9 | 10.9 | 72 |
| Craft tools | 3.9 | 10.7 | 43 |
| Kitchen gadgets | 2.1 | 10.6 | 69 |
| Productivity apps | 4.6 | 7.2 | 29 |
| Gaming accessories | 4.1 | 6.3 | 49 |
| Wireless earbuds | 0.0 | 5.3 | 10 |
| Clothing storage | 8.7 | 4.6 | 19 |
| Travel accessories | 0.0 | 4.3 | 14 |
| Coffee equipment | 2.9 | 2.5 | 14 |
2025 counts are small in every category, so treat that column as a rough baseline.
Reach amplifies it. Among comments written in 2026, videos under 100,000 plays drew 4.9 AI comments per 10,000; videos with 100,000 to 1 million plays, 8.0; 1 to 10 million, 13.9; over 10 million, 35.5.
Most AI comments are flat statements, and other viewers agree with them. 585 of the 765 are assertions ("This is AI", "it's AI"), 82 are questions ("Is this AI?") and 98 are jokes. On the same videos, 16.4% of AI comments collected 10 or more likes, against 7.7% of other comments.
Viewers and TikTok's label rarely point at the same video
525 of the 17,730 videos carried a TikTok AI label when we collected them, 499 of them posted in 2026. Among videos with at least 20 audience comments, the label and the comments line up in aggregate:
| Videos | Count | AI comments per 10,000 | With any AI comment | With 3 or more | With none |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carries a TikTok AI label | 137 | 106.9 | 28.5% | 11.7% | 71.5% |
| No label | 6,865 | 7.9 | 3.7% | 0.7% | 96.3% |
Video by video, they mostly disagree:
- Most videos viewers call AI have no label. Of the 293 videos with at least one AI comment, 39 are labeled, which is 13.3%. Of the 66 with three or more, 16 are, which is 24.2%. By their captions, the most-accused unlabeled videos include a calisthenics clip, a blowout hair tutorial and a set of embroidery tips. We did not inspect the videos themselves.
- Most labeled videos pass without comment. 71.5% of labeled videos drew no AI comment at all.
- Viewers are not mostly reading the label back. Only 5.7% of AI comments on labeled videos mention it ("It literally says contains ai generated media"). On unlabeled videos, 2.9% of AI comments use similar wording.
Neither side is ground truth. A label means TikTok's systems or the creator marked the video, not that every frame is synthetic, and a comment is a guess. In one reply we read, a creator whose video carried the label said they had not noticed it and do not use AI.
Creators mostly let it pass
Creators publicly replied to 30 of 743 top-level AI comments, 4.0%, and hearted 45. Reading the first 20 of those replies:
- Six deny it: "Nope", "no", "I am real", "No, it's an app", "💯 real", and the creator who had not seen the label.
- Two concede: one brand says it uses AI in some of its content to show product details, and one seller replies that the tool is good regardless.
- The rest are laughing emoji or unrelated.
Why it matters now
- TikTok's labels are expanding. On July 10, 2026, TikTok said it had "labeled over 3 billion videos as AIGC," using Content Credentials, creator labeling tools and invisible watermarking.
- People say they can no longer tell. In Malwarebytes' June 2026 survey of 1,500 adults in the US, UK, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, 88% said it is getting harder to tell what online content is genuinely human, and 84% said convincing video no longer feels like proof.
- Search interest rose on the same timeline. On Google Trends, worldwide searches for "is this ai" went from near zero in 2022 to a peak in late January 2026 and remain at about half that peak. "AI slop" peaked in March 2026. These are relative 0-100 indexes, not search volumes.
For a seller or creator, the comments suggest a practical point: a product video that looks too smooth now draws "this is AI" whether or not a label says so, and those comments collect more likes than ordinary ones.
What this can and cannot tell you
- Nobody here knows which videos are actually AI. The post compares two signals, TikTok's label and viewer comments, and neither is verified.
- Labels were read in September 2026, when we collected the videos. Some labels may have been added after earlier comments were written.
- The phrase list catches explicit AI talk only. Comments that doubt a video without using the words ("that's CGI", "fake video") are not counted, so the true level of doubt is higher.
- The videos come from TikTok search for 12 product categories, not a random sample of TikTok, and newer videos dominate the collection.
- AI comments are rare: about 0.1% of audience comments. The trend is clear; the absolute level is small.
Check the comments under any TikTok video
Crawlora's TikTok comments endpoint returns every top-level comment and inline reply with timestamps and language labels, so you can track how audiences react to AI content yourself.
Related reading
Frequently asked questions
How often do TikTok viewers comment that a video is AI?
Rarely, but more often every half-year. Across 783,961 audience comments on TikTok product videos, 765 say or ask whether a video is AI, about 1 in 1,000. The rate rose from 1.0 per 10,000 comments in the first half of 2024 to 13.5 in the second half of 2026, and the share of videos with at least one such comment rose from 0.3% to 1.85%.
Do 'this is AI' comments match TikTok's AI-generated label?
Only loosely. Videos carrying TikTok's AI label draw 106.9 AI comments per 10,000 against 7.9 on unlabeled videos, but 87% of the videos viewers called AI (254 of 293) carry no label, and 71.5% of labeled videos drew no AI comment at all. Only 5.7% of AI comments on labeled videos mention the label.
Which TikTok videos get the most AI accusations?
New videos with big reach. Videos posted before 2025 drew one AI comment out of 16,255 comments written in 2025 and 2026. In 2026, videos above 10 million plays drew 35.5 AI comments per 10,000 against 4.9 below 100,000 plays. By category, pet products (29.3 per 10,000) and hair styling tools (25.5) lead.
How do creators respond when viewers say their video is AI?
Mostly they don't. Creators publicly replied to 4.0% of top-level AI comments (30 of 743). In the first 20 replies we read, six deny using AI, two concede, and the rest are emoji or unrelated.