, Columnist
Six AI Questions I Want Answered in 2026
A year of AI slop.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
The word of the year for 2025, according to Merriam-Webster, was “slop,” referring to the deluge of low-quality content churned out by artificial intelligence.
It’s a fitting reflection of the awkward phase we’ve entered three years after ChatGPT kicked off the global AI boom. We were promised tools to cure disease and solve climate change. What we mostly got in 2025 was machine-generated pornography, fake bunnies jumping on trampolines, and an internet that feels a little more spammy every day.