In some ways, Gigi is like any other young social media influencer. With perfect hair and makeup, she logs on and talks to her fans. She shares clips: eating, doing skin care, putting on lipstick. She even has a cute baby who appears in some videos. But after a few seconds, something may seem a little off.

Speaking with popular AI content creators convinces me that "slop" isn't just the internet rotting in real time, but the early draft of a new kind of pop culture. Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives away. A cat comes in and starts hanging out with capybaras and bears, as if in some weird modern fairy tale. This fake-surveillance look has become one of the signature flavors of what people now call AI slop. For those of us who spend time online watching short videos, slop feels inescapable: a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram, and beyond. For that, you can thank new tools like OpenAI's Sora (which exploded in popularity after launching in app form in September), Google's Veo series, and AI models built by Runway. Now anyone can make videos, with just a few taps on a screen.

The companies, products and trends that fared the best over the last 12 months. Every December, the Engadget staff compiles a list of the year's biggest winners . We scour over articles from the previous 12 months to determine the people, companies, products and trends that made the most impact over the course of the year. Not all of that influence is positive, however, and some selections may also appear on our list of biggest losers. Still, sit back and enjoy our picks for the biggest winners of 2025.

Technology AI AI videos of animals could be dangerous. Here's how to spot them. Researchers warn that they can distort our connection to wildlife. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It happens more and more frequently.

How do AI videos end up on Donald Trump's social media accounts? President Donald Trump, a septuagenarian known for his general avoidance of keyboards and computers, has somehow become America's first generative AI president. The most infamous example of his experimentation with AI-generated videos came ahead of the No Kings protests earlier this month. In the clip, the president is decked out in full gear, piloting a fighter jet bearing "KING TRUMP" on its side. Instead of a traditional pilot's helmet, however, the president is wearing a literal crown, just in case the rest of the visuals were too subtle.

T he prompts read like tiny, abstract poems. The scenes come to life before my eyes in the form of AI-generated video. The videos pop up instantly--before my brain has had time to picture the prompts using my own imagination, as if the act of dreaming has been rendered obsolete, inefficient. I am experiencing Vibes, a new social network nested within the Meta AI app--except it's devoid of any actual people. This is a place where users can create an account and ask the company's large language model to illustrate their ideas. The resulting videos are then presented, seemingly at random, to others in a TikTok-style feed.

OpenAI has temporarily stopped its artificial intelligence (AI) app Sora creating deepfake videos portraying Dr Martin Luther King Jr, following a request from his estate. It said disrespectful content had been generated about the civil rights campaigner. Sora has become popular in the US for making hyper-realistic AI-generated videos, which has led to people sharing clips of deceased celebrities and historical figures in outlandish and often offensive scenarios. OpenAI said it would pause images of Dr King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures - but it continues to allow people to make clips of others. The firm has faced controversy over this stance, as videos featuring notable figures such as President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and Professor Stephen Hawking have been shared widely online.

The Download: extracting lithium, and what we still don't know about Sora On a bright afternoon in August, the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake looks like something out of a science fiction film set in a scorching alien world. This otherworldly scene is the test site for a company called Lilac Solutions, which is developing a technology it says will shake up the United States' efforts to pry control over the global supply of lithium, the so-called "white gold" needed for electric vehicles and batteries, away from China. The startup is in a race to commercialize a new, less environmentally-damaging way to extract lithium from rocks. If everything pans out, it could significantly increase domestic supply at a crucial moment for the nation's lithium extraction industry. Last week OpenAI released Sora, a TikTok-style app that presents an endless feed of exclusively AI-generated videos, each up to 10 seconds long. The app allows you to create a "cameo" of yourself--a hyperrealistic avatar that mimics your appearance and voice--and insert other peoples' cameos into your own videos (depending on what permissions they set).

Zelda has asked people to stop sending her AI videos of her father, who died in 2014 at the age of 63. Zelda has asked people to stop sending her AI videos of her father, who died in 2014 at the age of 63. Film-maker tells the public to stop sending her videos, saying: 'You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings' Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, has spoken out against AI-generated content featuring her father. "Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad," Zelda wrote in an Instagram story on Monday . "Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't. If you're just trying to troll me, I've seen way worse, I'll restrict and move on. But please, if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want. "To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough', just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. You can insert yourself into AI videos with OpenAI's new Sora 2 model There's also a new Sora app that's made for creating, remixing, and sharing AI-generated videos. OpenAI is now launching Sora 2, according to a recent announcement post . Sora 2 is the next generation of the company's AI video and audio generator, promising more realistic, physically accurate, and controllable results. Unlike previous models, which often "cheated" with physics, Sora 2 can generate more believable simulations.