Perhaps you have feelings about MTV’s untimely alleged passing on Jan. 1. What, didn’t you see all the New Year’s Eve eulogies sliding across your feed like tears ribboning down millions of teenagers’ cheeks? The communal misery was intense if you happened to stumble across some sad pool of it. “MTV is going off the air at midnight tonight . . . man. There was a time when MTV was THE channel to be watching on New Year’s Eve,” rued one Bluesky user.
He’s right. It’s been many years since the land of continuous “Ridiculousness” repeats gave us any reason to pay attention to it on most days, let alone in the waning hours of Dec. 31.
But if anybody bothered to click through their TV provider’s schedules that day, they may have cheered right up at seeing that MTV is very much alive.
At least the bamboozled weren’t tricked into leaving their homes on New Year’s Eve and gathering with hundreds of others to watch midnight fireworks on the Brooklyn Bridge — a highly anticipated event that was never officially scheduled, and therefore never materialized.
Videos captured people murmuring confusedly, presuming technical difficulties, before the truth dawned on the crowd that pyrotechnics would not be forthcoming.
How did so many come to believe that a premier pop culture brand would quietly go off the air without every major news outlet making a fuss, considering the countless obituaries that sent off MTV News when it shut down in 2023? How were so many otherwise reasonable people pranked into venturing to an empty Brooklyn Bridge Park in the bleak midwinter as 2025 ebbed to nothing, for nothing?
The simplest answer is that TikTok told them these events were real. An even simpler one is that they wanted them to be. But in some sense, the people seeking fireworks reaped the greater benefit of the lesson provided by this hoax. If they never left the house, they might have never seen for themselves that the promised event never happened, and therefore remained convinced by AI slop that it took place.
Merriam-Webster crowned “slop” as 2025’s word of the year in mid-December, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” As ever, the reference company made its choice well after the term became as common as potholes on a neglected road.
But if the term’s prevalence wasn’t fully understood before, it will be in 2026. Oozing slop seeps into the fractures of our separate realities, pushing our divisions further apart as digital deepfakes imitate life in ways that are increasingly difficult to detect. Careful as we may be to steer around most of these pits, it’s nigh impossible to avoid all of them. The best you can do to prevent lasting damage is to slow down and gently roll through the biggest ones.
That challenge is growing, even for the savviest of us. Polls continue to show that Americans still thoroughly distrust mainstream information delivery systems, and the ones that do would rather tune out the news than engage with it beyond what they see on Threads, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and other social media spaces.
Generative AI technology is improving to realistically depict politically convenient narratives or buttress the dominant vibes of any moment with falsified evidence. Aggregators willfully take advantage of news avoidance, narrow attention spans and short fuses.
Oozing slop seeps into the fractures of our separate realities, pushing our divisions further apart as digital deepfakes imitate life in ways that are increasingly difficult to detect. Careful as we may be to steer around most of these pits, it’s nigh impossible to avoid all of them.
MTV’s faked death is an example of that. In October, Paramount Skydance announced it would shut down music-specific MTV channels in the U.K. and Australia, including MTV Music, MTV ’80s, MTV ’90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live, at the crack of 2026. Drive-by headline readings led to an outcry that the media conglomerate was killing a generation-defining cable channel.
Many journalistic outlets that reported the story, including Salon, spelled out the specifics within the first paragraph or two. But who actually reads past the headlines for context anymore?
Besides, given the steady rate of media consolidation and layoffs, cancellations and quiet disappearances of all manner of screen-related ephemera, erasing a linear TV channel without most people noticing is not beyond the realm of plausibility. But is it really all that daunting to pick up your remote and click around a little to verify a shocking claim someone made on social media?
Maybe. We’ve been groping through this land of disbelief for some time now. The mass anguish over MTV’s greatly exaggerated demise confirms that Gen X, the oft-overlooked MTV generation, is easily reeled in by cheap nostalgia bait. An AI-tribute to the fallen, posted on Jan. 4, represents that breed of absurdity’s apex. (Shoutout to Dave Holmes, who triumphantly mocked the whole affair in an outstanding Esquire feature.)
At least those hoodwinked folks weren’t tricked into leaving their houses for nothing.
Then again, those New Year’s Eve revelers may have had their powers of basic detection and deductive reasoning sharpened by being led astray by AI slop. If they had consulted Brooklyn Bridge Park’s official site, or questioned why the footage featured in those fake ads mirrored the 2025 Macy’s Fourth of July celebration – which actually did take place at the Bridge – they might have found something better to do than wait beside a chilly river for sparks that never materialized in the sky.
Whatever. TikTok and the ‘Gram told them to go, so they did. Among the New Year’s Eve party-seekers was user @zackgill02, whose video went viral that night. “I mean, the amount of people who are misinformed here. . .” he says in the widely-shared clip. Offscreen, a woman’s voice wonders, “What does this say about 2026?”
“It’s not off to a good start,” he answers. No kidding.
Falsified images and propaganda have been misleading people to worse ends for many years, but these recent shams are evidence of a culture-wide abandonment of a common reality. Instead, we eagerly swallow impossible fantasies served up on screens that align with our version of how we want or expect the world to be.
And while it’s entertaining to giggle at a bunch of suckers mourning the end of a network that anyone can see is still around, or chumps who expected to woot at fiery starbursts launching from a bridge still visibly open to traffic, AI slop purveyors are counting on that level of credulity to further distort our perception of the world. This has real-world consequences that stand to affect all of us.
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The worst that befell most of those duped by New Year’s Eve AI-generated mischief was a little discomfort, embarrassment and wasted time. Meanwhile, for weeks, Elon Musk’s xAI’s generative artificial intelligence tool Grok dutifully fulfilled users’ undressing image requests, manipulating photos of women and children to depict them in skimpy clothing without their consent. Along the way, it also created images of minors that fall within the definition of child sexual abuse material.
On Wednesday, Jan. 14, after lawmakers in Britain, Brazil, India, and other countries threatened to involve their regulators, X introduced restrictions preventing the platform’s Grok account from generating or editing images of real people in “revealing clothing such as bikinis,” according to an official @Safety post, which adds that its image creation and editing feature will only be available to paid subscribers. This doesn’t mean those images will be any less shareable, except “in jurisdictions where such content is illegal,” says the official statement. A day after that announcement, researchers and journalists found they could still generate undressing-style images using Grok Imagine, a standalone app accessible via any web browser.
Falsified images and propaganda have been misleading people to worse ends for many years, but these recent shams are evidence of a culture-wide abandonment of a common reality.
The MTV and Brooklyn shenanigans are also fairly quaint next to Grok’s swift, inaccurate digital unmasking of the ICE agent who gunned down 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. Before Jonathan Ross was identified as the shooter, a social media user decided the face belonged to someone called Steve Grove. That name belongs to many people, including the Minnesota Star Tribune’s publisher and a Missouri gun shop owner. Both received threats shortly after that lie spread.
NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter cited six provably false claims about the shooting within a day, including four that used AI to fabricate or distort the facts. According to the report, those AI-generated hoaxes alone racked up 4.24 million views across X, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.
And this came days after fabricated videos, manipulated stills and mischaracterized reports related to the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro tore across the Internet.
Frames alleged to represent the special forces raid were easily proven to have been manipulated. A 2003 picture of a Delta Force operator beside a hooded Saddam Hussein was passed off by a few X users as a picture of Maduro en route to the U.S., which was entirely unnecessary since Donald Trump posted his own photo trophy on Truth Social.
Who’s to say if that’s legitimate, though? Actually, there are tools expressly dedicated to that purpose, although even they aren’t entirely reliable substitutes for healthy skepticism employed early and frequently.
Donald Trump weaponized the Orwellian art of making the masses trust him more than their eyes since the earliest days of his first administration. A year into his second, if there is an entitlement program he wants to defund or a constituency he and the right desires to demonize the White House’s social media team and its MAGA allies eagerly slop the zone.
Stemming the tide of misleading AI feels like a losing battle at a time when America’s leadership is more dedicated to locking its populace in a constant state of heightened emotion than governing to its benefit.
When SNAP benefits expired on Nov. 1, AI slop was ready to keep those who still buy into the Reagan-era welfare queen myth, including many of our elected officials, well fed with Sora-generated videos portraying scowling Black women abusing SNAP benefits.
“It is unsurprising that many of these fake AI videos feature black women as SNAP recipients, furthering a nasty and debunked stereotype about the types of people who receive government aid,” said documentary filmmaker Azza Cohen, the former White House videographer for Vice President Kamala Harris, in a video for The Contrarian. She adds, “Don’t fall for it. The real scammers aren’t parents trying to feed their kids. It’s our leaders in Congress who shut down the government and scammers creating this sexist and racist content.”
Disinformation AI slop isn’t limited to domestic affairs. Since Iranian authorities shut down nearly all of the country’s Internet access on Jan. 8 in response to ongoing anti-government protests, some users have been concocting AI videos to advance their version of the narrative. NewsGuard debunked a 14-second AI-generated video linked to a TikTok account that no longer exists that shows protesters cheering as someone changes the name of a street to Trump St. While the clip can no longer be found on TikTok, it remains visible elsewhere, including on a X post that user @Milajoy shared on Jan. 12 that has racked up more than 94,000 views.
Stemming the tide of misleading AI feels like a losing battle at a time when America’s leadership is more dedicated to locking its populace in a constant state of heightened emotion than governing to its benefit. This all but guarantees that many will prefer to stay safe at home and separate from the real world — perhaps while streaming past seasons of “The Real World” — while ignoring the most basic checklists involved in figuring out what is authentic and true, including trusting our gut feelings.
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Easy as it is to scoff at the gullibility of MTV mourners who couldn’t be bothered to check the casket or the crowd that was stood up on New Year’s Eve, any of us could have fallen for something similar if we haven’t already. All signs point to a hell of a time sorting fact from fiction as midterm campaigning heats up. AI can make half-truths and outright lies more entertaining than footage from any stump speech, which guarantees those falsehoods will spread faster than the details of a candidate’s policy positions.
And we can’t discount FOMO’s power to seduce us into placing undue trust in social media platforms continuing to be the best and only place to find out about experiences so exclusive, so underground that most people would never find them. Because they’re not happening.
What’s to be done? Perhaps apply the philosophies of all those “New Year, New You” mindfulness coaches to breaking news or can’t-miss promises designed to manipulate emotions to slip past our logical safeguards. Slow down. Think. Find corroborating information from an official or trusted source, including the people who run the places or channels where that Extremely Exciting/Enraging/Exclusive event is supposedly taking place.
Common sense works too. Ask any MTV fans still bereft over its exaggerated demise how the latest season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” can still be airing on, yes, MTV. Help your friends connect the dots.
Above all, we should all take to heart this most quintessentially New York piece of advice from Dan, the creator of All Day NYC: “Stop following these fugazi pages.”
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