AI slop named word of 2025 by Macquarie Dictionary

Showing all posts about artificial intelligence

AI slop named word of 2025 by Macquarie Dictionary

29 November 2025

The Australian dictionary’s word of the year committee were scathing, to say the least, of their pick:

We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use. While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop. Slop in this sense will be a robust addition to English for years to come. The question is, are the people ingesting and regurgitating this content soon to be called AI sloppers?

I’d hoped Macquarie Dictionary would make IndieWeb their word for 2025. Enshittification, by the way, was the 2024 word of the year.

Sam Altman, Jony Ive, tease arrival of their AI device

27 November 2025

Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:

In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, they [Altman and Ive] said they are currently prototyping the device, and when asked about a timeframe, Ive said it could arrive in “less than” two years.

We only have to wait another two years to see what this is all about. From what I can gather though — albeit as an armchair expert — we might see an AI powered powered device, possibly similar in appearance to a smartphone, but without a screen, that responds only to voice commands.

As to what actually eventuates, only time will tell.

ChatGPT to remove em-dashes from AI generated output if asked

17 November 2025

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, posting on X:

If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!

It finally does what it’s supposed to do.

Am I to think AI agents were not supposed to include em-dashes in their input (and here I go) — unless said use was grammatically correct — all along? Were agents initially supplied a list of punctuation marks and told they could be used as they saw fit?

In other words, quite indiscriminately?

How unfortunate to think poor training of agents in the correct use of em-dashes, and Oxford commas, has lead to the perception that any text containing them is AI generated.

Here’s hoping other AI companies follow ChatGPT’s lead, and the rest of us can resume using em-dashes, and other maligned punctuation marks, as intended.

‘AI Window’ lets Firefox users opt-in to Mozilla AI browser

15 November 2025

Elissa Welle, writing for The Verge, with some apparent clarification regarding Mozilla’s proposal to launch an AI browser:

AI Window will be one of three browsing experiences offered to Firefox users in addition to the private and classic windows.

Long time Firefox users were concerned Mozilla intended to turn the venerable (once venerable?) browser into a fully-powered AI app. It seems the browser manufacturer is attempting to assuage these fears by making it clear the AI Window feature will be opt-in, and the “classic”, AI free, version will continue to be available.

AI information summaries eating away at Wikipedia reader base

29 October 2025

Just about every online publisher has experienced a decline in the number of people reading articles and information published on their websites. Search engines presently do such a good job of breaking down the main points of news reports, blog posts, and the like, that seekers of information are seldom reading the material at its source.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no exception, and falls in visitors stand to threaten what is surely an invaluable resource, along with others such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What happens if we follow this shift in the way people obtain information to its absurd, yet logical, conclusion? If websites such as Wikipedia, Britannica, along with news sites, and many, many, others, are forced to close because no one visits them anymore, what is going to feed the search engine AI summaries we’ve become accustomed to?

In short, we’re going to see AI summaries eat the web, and then eat themselves. The onus here is on search engines, AKA answer engines, and whatever other services generate AI summaries, to use them more selectively, and wean information seekers off them.

Is that something anyone can see happening? No, I didn’t think so.

ChatGPT Atlas browser: the greatest thing since tabs in Firefox

27 October 2025

Tabbed browsing, was, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the last significant web browser innovation. Although tabbed browsing didn’t become common place until around 2002, the idea dates back to 1994, with the arrival of InternetWorks, a browser made by BookLink Technologies. Altman seems to be suggesting browsers have barely changed since the early days of the web.

He made the remark during his introduction to ChatGPT Altas, OpenAI’s new web browser, last week. His words made people take notice, but Altman doesn’t seem to know his onions. Atlas is not a web browser, it is an AI-powered aggregator of information, which may, or may not, be accurate.

So far, Atlas is only available on MacOs, meaning I’ve not had a chance to try the innovative “browser” out, but certain aspects of its functionality either baffled or alarmed me, as I watched the OpenAI video presentation. To make use of Atlas, we are required to type out commands or prompts, in strikingly similar fashion to ChatGPT.

That’s not typically how browsers are used, but as I say, Atlas doesn’t seem like a web browser to me anyway. Of more concern is the way Atlas can, potentially, access files on the local drive of your computer, or if you allow it, the contents of your email app. AI scrapers, including no doubt OpenAI’s, have been trawling my website for years probably, but that’s content in the public domain.

AI bots going through what’s in my email app, and doing whatever with it, including training LLMs is another matter entirely. But Atlas is an AI browser, so buyer beware, this is no normal web “browser” if it is even one in the first place. If people want to use it, that’s for them to decide.

What’s more unsettling though, are regular browsers, such as Firefox, morphing into AI-browsers. Mozilla, the manufacturer of Firefox, which I have been using for over twenty years, is not, it seems, introducing a new browser line, instead it is integrating AI features into an existing product.

This is not a good move, we’re all going to end up running clones of Atlas on our devices, whether we like it or not. If Mozilla wants to make an AI-powered browser, fine, but develop a separate product, and let users decide if they want to use it. Leave the original Firefox, whose early predecessor, Phoenix, shipped with those groundbreaking tabs Altman spoke of, back in 2002, as it is.

Somehow I cannot see any of that happening. Firefox is going to become an AI browser whether we like it or not. There is, however a way to opt out of Firefox’s AI functionality, as New Zealand/Aotearoa blogger fLaMEd Fury, has detailed.

Authors claim Salesforce used their novels to train AI agents

21 October 2025

American novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore have launched legal action against Salesforce, accusing the San Francisco based software company of copyright infringement.

Tanzer and Gilmore allege Salesforce used thousands of novels, not just their work, without permission, to train AI agents.

Salesforce want to have their cake and eat it as well. After replacing several thousand workers with AI technologies, presumably saving the company large sums of money, Salesforce want to pay as little as possible to develop the AI agents that displaced the workers in the first place.

What part of any of this is reasonable?

Robotic self-driving vehicles a threat to gig-economy food delivery work

9 October 2025

Robocart, a US company, has been developing self-driving vehicles that have the capacity to deliver ten different customer orders in a single run. The service, which the company plans to launch in Austin, Texas, later this year, will see customers pay just three-dollars per delivery, pricing many people will find attractive.

But Chicago based cybersecurity and network infrastructure expert Nick Espinosa warns that such a service stands to eliminate the roles of many food delivery drivers (YouTube link), working on behalf of companies such as Uber Eats and Door Dash.

Earlier this year, I was hearing stories about Australian web and app developers taking on food delivery work, as AI apps are doing the work they used to, for a fraction of the cost. While many of these people will be able to re-skill and eventually find new work, what will they do in the meantime, if casual work begins drying up?

Comment spammers use AI in another assault on bloggers

2 October 2025

When I turned comments back on here a few months ago, after an absence of many years, I was amazed at how quickly spam comments began appearing. Good news travels fast it seems. A new outlet has appeared for us to post our drivel — quick — get over there. But because every comment made here is held back for approval, none of them ever see the light of day.

Of course I wasn’t really surprised at the speed at which the spam arrived. Nor the lack of genuine comments, though there have been a few. I re-enabled comments as a way to centralise my web presence back onto this website. I’m not the biggest fan of social media, centralised or decentralised, but not because I dislike it (well, not too much), rather social media is just too time consuming.

What did dumbfound me though was the empty-headed nature of the spam comments being left. Some were barely coherent, while others were literally single words made up of random letters. What blogger, in their right mind, is going to approve those sorts of comments? A time-poor blogger, or one not paying attention, I think might be the answer.

These senseless utterances aren’t offensive, so maybe they’ll, you know, just get approved. And with some websites allowing follow-up comments from the same person to be posted without moderation, the floodgates would be open. But I suspect few spam-commenters saw much of what they wrote ever approved. But now they have changed tactics, and are using AI to craft their foul fare.

A lot of the recent comment spam I’m seeing looks as if the writer has read the post they’re responding to, through the way a comment is worded. When I posted about Tim Berners-Lee a few days ago, a lot of comments similar to this began appearing:

Oh Timothy, your call to have AI development moved under the auspices of a global not-for-profit is just a little simplistic, don’t you think? Yes, you invented the internet and gave it to us for free, and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But placing AI development in the hands of a non-commercial entity is asking an awful lot.redacted spammy link

At first pass, the comment seems genuine. I too thought Berners-Lee was being optimistic in the extreme by suggesting a global not-for-profit organisation oversee future development of AI, but I’d never call Berners-Lee naive. He knows what he’s saying, and the idea makes sense, though I can’t see it ever happening. But that’s another story.

A commenter though is entitled to their opinion. And it almost seemed like an actual point-of-view, but for the ridiculous inclusion of an embedded spam link. Without, notably, a space after the previous sentence. The writer seems switched-on, but their oddly deficient syntax betrays them. And then the question: why on earth embed a spam link within the comment?

Did they not see the field on the comment form that allows a URL to be included? It’s possible I might have missed the spam-link if they did that. Usually though, I look closely at the URL of a commenter’s website. But then going on to post numerous, slightly differently worded, variations of the same comment, from the same IP no less, somewhat gives the show away.

Even writing this article is helping train the AI spam-commenters though. What bloggers, who allow comments, are facing though are somewhat more sophisticated spammers, who are using AI to compose comment spam that look like the real deal.

And yes, I look forward to seeing the thoughts of the AI spam-commenters in response to this post.

Tim Berners-Lee: the web needs to return to its roots

30 September 2025

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, writing for The Guardian:

I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever. Regulation and global governance are technically feasible, but reliant on political willpower. If we are able to muster it, we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It’s not too late.

Berners-Lee also calls for AI research and development to be facilitated by a not-for-profit body, along the lines of CERN, the international organisation where Berners-Lee created the internet.

« older posts