This year we were drowning in a sea of slick, nonsensical AI slop

There is no doubt that 2025 will be remembered as the year of septic tanks. The popular term for the wrong, weird and often downright ugly content created by artificial intelligence, “slop” has rotted away on almost every platform on the internet. It also corrupts our minds.

Enough slop has accumulated over the past few years that scientists can now measure its effects on people over time. MIT researchers found that people who use large language models (LLMs), like those behind ChatGPT, to write essays show much less brain activity than those who don't. Additionally, there are potential detrimental effects on our mental health. reports that some chatbots encourage people to believe in fantasies or conspiracies, or encourage self-harm, and that they may trigger or worsen psychosis.

Deepfakes have also become the norm, making it impossible to verify the truth online. According to study Microsoft, humans can recognize AI-generated videos only 62 percent of the time.

OpenAI's latest application is Sora, a video sharing platform built entirely by artificial intelligence, with one exception. The app will scan your face and insert you and other real people into the fake scenes it creates. OpenAI founder Sam Altman made the implications clear by allowing people to make videos of him. GPU theft And singing in the toilet in Skibidi style toilet.

But what about AI's much-touted ability to make us work faster and smarter? According to one study, when AI is introduced into the workplace, it reduces productivitywhile 95 percent of organizations are implementing AI speaking they don't get a noticeable return on their investment.

Slops destroy lives and jobs. And it also destroys our history. I write books about archeology and worry that when historians look back at the media of the era, they find a sludge layer of our content that is slippery and full of lies. One of the important reasons we write things down or videotape them is to leave a record of what we did during a certain period of time. When I write, I hope to create a record for the future so that people 5,000 years from now can catch a glimpse of who we were in all our messiness.

AI chatbots spew words without meaning; they generate content, not memories. From a historical point of view, this is in some ways worse than propaganda. At least propaganda is carried out by people with a specific purpose. This says a lot about our politics and problems. Slop erases us from our own historical memory because it is harder to understand the purpose behind it.

Perhaps the only way to combat the decline of our culture now is to create words that have no meaning. This may be one of the reasons why the Gen Z “6-7” craze has entered the mainstream. Although this is not a word, it was stated 6-7 “word of the year” To Dictionary.com. You can say 6-7 any time you don't have a clear answer to something, or especially for no reason. What does the future hold for us? 6-7. What will AI slop do to art? 6-7. How do we act in a world where jobs are scarce, violence is on the rise, and climate science is systematically ignored? 6-7.

I'd like to see AI companies try to turn 6-7 into content. They can't because people will always be one step ahead of the scum, creating new forms of nonsense and ambiguity that only another person can truly appreciate.