The cream of the slop: this year's AI highlights
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.1 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
2025 has proved that artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping online reality and that the “slop” is here to stay.
NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel and Shannon Bond have spent much of the year rolling around in that slop and join host Scott Detrow to break down some of the highlights and how to sort the real from the fake.
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This episode was produced by Elena Burnett and Daniel Ofman.
It was edited by Brett Neely, John Ketchum and Courtney Dorning.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are going to kick off today's episode with a little bit of a cliche, a dictionary definition. |
| 0:04.9 | But stick with us. It's relevant. And Merriam Webster forced our hand by making slop its word of the gear. |
| 0:10.8 | Their definition? Digital content of low quality that is usually produced in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. |
| 0:17.9 | You know it. You've seen it. It's weird. It's clunky. And it is everywhere. |
| 0:22.3 | Blue cooler car. Wait, son. Let me have some. |
| 0:26.2 | Dad check this pancake blimp. Nuts. There he is officer. He stole my pancakes. |
| 0:31.6 | The YouTube channel, Fantastic YT, has been cranking out short videos featuring |
| 0:36.3 | cartoon cats. |
| 0:37.7 | It's racked up hundreds of millions of views. |
| 0:40.5 | An AI-generated summer reading list was published by major newspapers and featured 10 made-up |
| 0:45.4 | titles from real best-selling authors, like The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir or The Rainmakers |
| 0:50.6 | by Percival Everett. |
| 0:52.1 | Playlists were also slopped. |
| 0:58.0 | Slowed away, don't close your eyes. Smoke is written in the skies. |
| 1:01.0 | Sing the lie they made you learn. |
| 1:05.0 | Let it burn. Let it burn. |
| 1:08.0 | This summer, music from a band called The Velvet Sundown, flooded Spotify users, Discover Weekly Feeds. |
| 1:14.1 | And within a few weeks, the band's music had been streamed millions of times before anybody noticed the group wasn't actually real. |
| 1:24.7 | In September, Spotify announced it had removed 75 million spammy tracks from its platform. |
| 1:31.8 | But other companies began to wallow in the slot. |
| 1:34.7 | In the same week, Meta released a feed for users to create and share AI-generated videos. |
| 1:40.6 | An OpenAI launched a new version of an app to generate video and audio. |
... |
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