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.

Muskan Sharma stood up to men who tried to bully her over her clothes - and went on to win hearts and a beauty pageant. The 23-year-old, who was crowned Miss Rishikesh 2025 last week in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, told the BBC that even though it was a small local pageant, it made me feel like Miss Universe. Sharma's win has made headlines in India as it came after a viral video that showed her spiritedly arguing with a man who barged into their rehearsals just a day before the 4 October contest. Sharma, who wanted to be a model and participate in a pageant since I was in school, said the intruders came in just as they broke for lunch. We were sitting around, chilling, having a laugh when they walked in, she said.

Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy reports on President Donald Trump's response to a viral video that allegedly showed a plastic bag being thrown out of a White House residence window on'The Story.' President Donald Trump has dismissed a bizarre viral video showing mystery objects being hurled from a White House window as fake. The footage appeared to show someone repeatedly throwing objects from the top floor of the White House onto the lawn below. At a packed press conference, the president told how the mansion's windows were sealed and bulletproof and suggested the clip was made by AI. The short video began circulating widely on social media over the weekend and racked up thousands of views while fueling speculation online. People debated whether the clip showed a staffer, while others floated conspiracy theories about hidden activities inside the Washington, D.C., mansion with items lobbed from what many speculated was the Lincoln Bedroom. At first, a White House official claimed the footage involved a contractor carrying out routine maintenance while Trump was away.

Footage of a Japanese naval destroyer that circulated on Chinese social media is likely genuine, Tokyo's Defense Ministry said Thursday, after initial speculation the video may have been generated by artificial intelligence. No obvious military activity can be seen in the clip, which appears to show the docked Izumo helicopter carrier. According to officials, footage "purportedly shot by a drone" was first uploaded to Chinese video-sharing platform Bilibili on March 26.

Influencer who used AI to dupe internet into thinking she caught her boyfriend cheating reveals she was inspired to do the skit because of real artificial voice scams. An influencer who made up a prank video claiming she used AI to catch her boyfriend cheating told Fox News her skit was a farce, but the voice-cloning technology she used to power the trick was not, and the skit was inspired by real scams. Mia Dio, a social media influencer with over 5 million TikTok followers, filmed a video of her using artificial intelligence to clone her boyfriend Billy's voice to see if he had cheated on her. The inspiration for the viral video came from reports of AI voice-cloning scams, she told Fox News. Dio used voicemails left by her boyfriend Billy to recreate his voice using AI software.

Since graduating from a US university four years ago, Kevin Carballo has lost count of the number of times he has applied for a job only to receive a swift, automated rejection email - sometimes just hours after applying. Like many job seekers around the world, Mr Carballo's applications are increasingly being screened by algorithms built to automatically flag attractive applicants to hiring managers. "There's no way to apply for a job these days without being analysed by some sort of automated system," said Mr Carballo, 27, who is latino and the first member of his family to go to university. "It feels like shooting in the dark while being blindfolded - there's just no way for me to tell my full story when a machine is assessing me," Mr Carballo, who hoped to get work experience at a law firm before applying to law school, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. From Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs that assess an applicant's facial expressions during a video interview, to resume screening platforms predicting job performance, the AI recruitment industry is valued at more than $500 million (£350 million).

For years, people have joked that Boston Dynamics is more a maker of viral videos than of robots. The company has dazzled (and sometimes creeped out) the internet with clips of its robotic dog Spot walking, climbing stairs, jumping, dancing, and gyrating--but not doing any real work. In September, though, the company (which was previously part of Alphabet's X research arm) started leasing Spots to companies that want to put it to work, at least in pilot projects. The first to debut a full application using Spot is a German-American firm called HoloBuilder. It's equipped the robot to regularly walk large construction sites, collecting 360-degree images, a la Google Street View, so engineers can track the progress of work.

And we focus really on the athletic part of it. I think, though, that if you do a good job on the athletic part, which is also kind of the low-level part, you can make it easier for high-level AI to interact with you." In other words, it's much easier to direct a robot to take care of a task for you if you've already taught the robot how to stand, walk, navigate, and so on.

On a recent fall day at MIT, a group of players kicked around a soccer ball on the school's Killian Court lawn. They ran around and jumped in piles of leaves. But these weren't students, they were cheetahs. MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Labratory, which sits across the lawn from the school's iconic main building, created these so-called mini cheetahs, four-legged robots that are powered by 12 motors. They can run around untethered from cables, steered by nearby researchers using an RC-like controller. With the same basic dimensions of a Boston terrier and movements similar to that dog's energetic, scampering gait, the silver robots are strikingly adorable.

Now, you might be thinking that Apple already has a few video creation and editing tools available for iOS, and you'd be right. On one end of the spectrum, you've got Memories videos –- iOS 10 automatically pieces these slideshow videos together from photos you've taken in the past. Meanwhile, iMovie sits on the other end. It's not too hard to wrap your head around, but laying out clips and audio tracks on a timeline can seem daunting to beginners. It's not hard to see how Apple created Clips to fill the gap between these two experiences, and the simplified process of creating and editing will feel awfully familiar to some.