The year in slop

The Turing Test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, measures the point at which a text-generating machine can fool a human into thinking they are not a robot. ChatGPT surpassed that benchmark earlier this year, ushering in a new technological era, although not necessarily an era of superhuman intelligence. More recently, however, artificial intelligence has crossed another threshold, a kind of Turing test for the eye: the images and videos that AI can generate are now sometimes indistinguishable from real ones. As new, image-friendly models have been trained, refined, and released by companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google, the online public has been given the ability to instantly generate realistic AI content on any topic imaginable, from superhero fan art and cute animals to scenes of violence and war. “Slop”, the term of (non-)art for content produced with AI, became ubiquitous in 2025, …