Plus: China-linked hackers have hit Taiwan in an "unprecedented" AI attack How we picked 35 of the world's top young scientists and engineers On September 8, will reveal its 2026 list of Innovators Under 35, recognizing 35 young people from around the world who are doing groundbreaking scientific work and building clever technical fixes for sticky problems. By finding the top young innovators globally and learning what they're focused on in their work, we aim to give readers a sense of what advances to expect in the years to come. As a newsroom, we also use this exercise to help us spot rising talent and get to know some of the best early-career researchers in the fields that we cover. This year, we received 550 nominations. Find out how we whittled them down to 35 of the young innovators shaping the future of technology, and check out last year's list. How the "censorship-industrial complex" is changing the internet and US policy I first heard the term "censorship-industrial complex" on April 15, 2025.

Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the age of ChatGPT.

AI'slop' is transforming social media - and a backlash is brewing Théodore remembers the AI slop that tipped him over the edge. The image was of two emaciated, impoverished South Asian children. For some reason, despite their boyish features they have thick beards. One of them had no hands and only one foot. The other was holding a sign saying it's his birthday and asking for likes.

'Music is not a problem to solve' Mikey Shulman, co-founder and CEO of Suno. 'Music is not a problem to solve' Mikey Shulman, co-founder and CEO of Suno. Is this man the future of music - or its executioner? AI evangelist Mikey Shulman says he's making pop, not slop Worth a staggering $2.45bn, Suno is an AI music company that can create a track with just a few prompts. Why is its CEO happy to see it called'the Ozempic of the music industry'?

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.