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slash grow without limits. JPMorgan is the Bank of the Innovation Economy. Hello and welcome to

Equity Techhunch's podcast on the business of startups. Today is Friday, December 19th, and I am

weekend editor Anthony Ha. I'm here with senior writers, Rebecca Boulon and Sean O'Kane.

Kirsten is not here this week, but she will be back next week.

In the meantime, I did want to talk about the word of the year, at least according to

Merriam-Webster.

Rebecca, what is the word of the year?

Slop.

We're sloppy. AI slop. And how did you feel about it?

Yeah, no, I think it makes sense.

AI slop has seeped into everything.

I mean, as we were just discussing before we got on the call, I was talking about how obsessed I am with videos of dogs saving babies.

And Sean was like, oh, there's, there's like a scandal happening. A lot of these videos are actually just AI slop and just made up. Is this true, Sean? To be fair, I hope it's, you know, they're actually out there saving babies, but I know it's a thing that has taken some people recently. So I hope that, I hope that you were watching some of the real ones. I really hope I was too. We really need a way. Surely there's a way for us to know when we're watching something that's AI generated. But I guess that would take away the. Oh, there are ways. There are ways to know. They just act against the interests of the companies that's putting it out there. Exactly. Well, there's ways to know, but not necessarily to be

certain, right? There's usually tells, but also we start to get paranoid. I mean, we were talking a few weeks ago about the whole M-Dash thing of, you know, I use a lot of M-dashes. It doesn't mean my writing's AI generated. I love M-dashes. I'm trying, I'm actively trying not to use M-dashes now. I'm like, what do I use instead? I guess like shorter sentences,

semicolons. I brought back the semicolon. I don't know. But anyway, Slop is the word of the year.

It's defined as low-quality digital content produced at scale by AI. And there were some other winners of the year in terms of word choices, like Rage Bay and vibe coding. But the thing that I think is

interesting about Slop is since this has been, since that got announced, I don't know if you guys

have noticed on Twitter that a lot of people are talking about how, oh yeah, sure, this isn't Slop.

Like, you know, the only boomers call it Slop. Look how amazing this content is. And to me, it's not just about like, okay, yeah, sure, you can get nanobanana to make some cool looking images and that's really great. A runway makes amazing videos and that's really cool. But it's, it's just the slot portion comes from, I don't know, is it real? Is it not real? But there's so much of it. And all I do is, nom, nom, nom, numb, numb, like just consume, consume. And what happens to the internet if all you do is consume stuff, you don't know if it's real and you're just constantly entertained. If this is going to be a word that sticks around for a while, and I assume it is, especially

now that it's chosen as a word of the year, I also, I think it's important to keep in mind that,

...