MIT Technology Review

If I were to locate the moment slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical riffs, with people making videos of all kinds of animals and objects bouncing on the same trampoline. My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked.

Here are four ways to think about the state of AI at the end of 2025: The start of a much-needed hype correction.

A US telecommunications company trained an AI model on years of inmates’ phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes. Securus Technologies president Kevin Elder said the company began building its AI tools in 2023, using its massive database of recorded calls to train AI models to detect criminal activity.

Even if you don’t have an AI friend yourself, you probably know someone who does.