AI Wrapped: The 14 AI terms you couldn't avoid in 2025 From "superintelligence" to "slop," here are the words and phrases that defined another year of AI craziness. If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it's that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It's hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry on its head, Meta was better known for trying (and failing) to make the metaverse cool than for its relentless quest to dominate superintelligence, and vibe coding wasn't a thing. If that's left you feeling a little confused, fear not. As we near the end of 2025, our writers have taken a look back over the AI terms that dominated the year, for better or worse. Make sure you take the time to brace yourself for what promises to be another bonkers year.

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.

This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, sometimes fooling us against our better judgment. The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, gauges the point at which a text-generating machine can fool a human into thinking it's not a robot. ChatGPT passed that benchmark earlier this year, inaugurating a new technological era, though not necessarily one of superhuman intelligence . More recently, however, artificial intelligence passed another threshold, a kind of Turing test for the eye: the images and videos that A.I. can produce are now sometimes indistinguishable from real ones. As new, image-friendly models were trained, refined, and released by companies including OpenAI, Meta, and Google, the online public gained the ability to instantly generate realistic A.I. content on any theme they could imagine, from superhero fan art and cute animals to scenes of violence and war.

There is no doubt that 2025 will be remembered as the year of slop. A popular term for incorrect, weird and often downright ugly AI-generated content, slop has rotted nearly every platform on the internet. Enough slop has accumulated over the past few years that scientists can now measure its effects on people over time. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people using large language models (LLMs) such as those behind ChatGPT to write essays show far less brain activity than those who don't. And then there are the potential ill-effects on our mental health, with reports that certain chatbots are encouraging people to believe in fantasies or conspiracies, as well as urging them to self-harm, and that they may trigger or worsen psychosis.

Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences. Here's a thought many of us have these days: if only we weren't on our damn phones all the time, we would surely unlock a better self--one that went on hikes and talked more with our children and felt less rank jealousy about other people's successes. It's a nice idea; once a day, at least, I wonder what my life would be like if I smashed my phone into bits and never contacted AppleCare. Would I become a scratch golfer or one of those fathers who does thousand-piece puzzles with his children? Would I at least read more difficult novels?

No, your favourite influencer hasn't got a dozen dachshund dogs. When scrolling through social media recently, you might have noticed posts which seem a bit off. It's all AI generated and due to its low quality and its inauthenticity, it's being branded AI slop. Both social media users and content creators say they're worried that AI slop flooding feeds is leading to a less authentic online experience - and is drowning out real posts. But a new trend, which sees people adding AI-generated animals to original photographs, has encouraged some content creators to embrace AI.

There's a lot at stake when it comes to understanding how AI is changing the economy right now. Or is the situation too nuanced for that? Hopefully, we can point you towards some answers. Mat Honan, our editor in chief, will hold a special subscriber-only Roundtables conversation with our editor at large David Rotman, and Richard Waters, columnist, exploring what's happening across different markets. Register here to join us at 1pm ET on Tuesday December 9. The event is part of the and "The State of AI" partnership, exploring the global impact of artificial intelligence.

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.

Mark Wahlberg straightens his tie and beams at the audience as he takes his seat on daytime talk show The View, ahead of his hotly anticipated interview. Immediately, he's unsettled by the host, Joy Behar. Her eyes seem shifty, suspicious, even predatory. There's a sense, almost, of the uncanny valley--her presence feels oddly inhuman. His instincts are right, of course, and he's soon forced to defend himself against a barrage of cruel insults playing on his deepest vulnerabilities.

For a while, dating apps seemed to make it easier, putting a city's worth of single people in the palm of your hand. But AI has cast a paranoid pall over what can already be a suboptimal experience. If you get a message that feels a little off, it is hard to know whether you are flirting with a bot--or just someone insecure enough to use ChatGPT as their own Cyrano de Bergerac. In frustration, my friend Lonni has started picking up women at the nail salon like it's 1997. Or, in the midst of an emotionally fraught conversation with a friend or family member, a text might read strangely.