By Pascale Davies
Publication Date: 2026-01-01 06:00:00
People who were annoyed about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) did not go unnoticed in dictionaries in 2025. One couple called their 2025 word of the year “slop” or “AI slop,” defined as low-quality content produced in large quantities by AI.
“Slop seeps into everything,” wrote the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The year also marked a possible AI flop, as rumors of the AI bubble bursting circulated.
Still, the gloom hasn’t stopped tech companies from upping their game by releasing new AI models. Google’s new Gemini 3 model caused an uproar, reportedly prompting OpenAI to sound the alarm and announce a “Code Red” to urgently improve their GPT-5 model.
But with chatbots only as good as the data they’re trained on, and AI leaders warning that we’ve reached the “peak of data,” a different kind of AI could emerge in 2026 amid the fatigue.
Here’s what we could see for AI in the coming year.
The rise of world models
The peak data warning for 2026 has nothing to do with this…
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