The Year in Slop

"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. "Slop," the term of (not) art for content churned out with A.I., became ubiquitous in 2025, inspiring new sub-coinages such as "slopper," derogatory shorthand for someone who relies on A.I. to think for them."

The Turing test measures when a text-generating machine can fool a human. ChatGPT passed that benchmark earlier in the year, marking a technological shift without guaranteeing superhuman intelligence. Image and video A.I. models reached a visual indistinguishability threshold, producing media that can mimic reality. Companies including OpenAI, Meta, and Google released refined image-capable models that let users instantly generate realistic content across themes from fan art to scenes of violence. The proliferation spawned the term "slop" for mass-produced A.I. imagery and related coinages like "slopper." Political actors adopted A.I.-generated "agitslop" for persuasion, and corporate figures became pervasive A.I. mascots.

Read at The New Yorker