OpenAI Founder Sam Altman Featured on Sora
Sora/Screenshot
There is no doubt that 2025 will be remembered as the year of mud. A popular term for incorrect, weird, and often downright ugly AI-generated content, slop has ruined almost every platform on the internet. It also rots our minds.
Sediment has accumulated enough in recent years that scientists can now measure its effects on populations over time. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology find that people using large language models (LLMs) such as those behind ChatGPT to write essays show significantly less brain activity than those who don’t. And then there are the potential detrimental effects on our mental health, with reports that some chatbots encourage people to believe in fantasies or conspiracies, as well as self-harm, and that they can trigger or worsen psychosis.
Deepfakes have also become the norm, making the truth online impossible to verify. According to a study by Microsoft, people can only recognize AI-generated videos 62% of the time.
OpenAI’s latest application is Sora, a video sharing platform powered entirely by AI, with one exception. The app will scan your face and insert you and other real people into the fake scenes it generates. OpenAI founder Sam Altman shed light on the implications by allowing people to make videos featuring him. steal GPUs And singing in a toilet bowl, Skibidi Toilet style.
But what about AI’s much-vaunted ability to make us work faster and smarter? According to a study, when AI is introduced into the workplace, it decreases productivitywith 95% of organizations deploying AI adage they get no noticeable return on their investments.
Slop is ruining lives and jobs. And it also ruins our history. I write books about archeology and I worry that historians are looking at the media of that era and picking at the sloppy layer of our content that is clever and full of lies. One of the important reasons we write things down or record them on video is to leave a record of what we were doing at a particular time. When I write, I hope to create an archive for the future, so that people 5,000 years from now can get a glimpse of who we were, in all our messiness.
AI chatbots regurgitate meaningless words; they generate content, not memories. From a historical perspective, it is, in some ways, worse than propaganda. At least the propaganda is made by people, for a specific purpose. This says a lot about our politics and our problems. Slop erases us from our own history, because it is more difficult to understand its purpose.
Perhaps the only way to resist the devaluation of our culture today is to create words that have no meaning. This may be one of the reasons why Generation Z’s craze for “6-7” has spread to the general public. Even though it’s not a word, 6-7 has been declared “word of the year” by Dictionary.com. You can say 6-7 whenever you don’t have a clear answer to something – or, especially, for no reason at all. What does the future hold for us? 6-7. What will AI do to art? 6-7. How will we navigate a world where jobs are scarce, violence is increasing, and climate science is systematically ignored? 6-7.
I would love to see AI companies try to turn 6-7 into content. They can’t, because humans will always be one step ahead, generating new forms of absurdities and ambiguities that only another human can truly appreciate.
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