2025 Was the Year AI Slopified All Our Gadgets

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage at the company’s big, splashy I/O developer conference this summer, we all knew what was coming next: Gemini. Lots of its AI chatbot, Gemini,

Google, arguably more than any other company in the world outside of OpenAI, has leaned full-tilt into its AI onslaught, and Gemini, along with its seemingly never-ending offshoots, is at the center of that herculean shift. The results of that obsession were felt across its entire spectrum of products, too.

There’s Gemini in your Pixel phone, Gemini in your Gmail, and Gemini in your Pixel Watch. Gemini now sifts your Nest security cameras and shouts at you from old and new Google smart speakers, and if you’re a certain kind of person, it coos your kids to sleep with algorithmically generated bedtime stories. And that’s just scratching the surface.

It’s safe to say that, right now, Gemini is everything for Google, but if you still don’t believe me, I took the liberty—for the purposes of this retrospective—of tallying up how many times Google said the word “Gemini†in the span of its 1 hour and 56 minutes of I/O conference this year. Place your bets now. I’ll give you a second. Ready?

According to a YouTube transcript from the conference, the answer is 112 times, including in-person speakers and pre-recorded videos. About 1 time every 1 minute and 3 seconds, if we’re averaging that out.

The wild part is that, while Google is probably the most notable pursuer in the race toward complete AI saturation, it’s far from the only one. I/O 2025 may have been an eye-opener, but it was actually, in a lot of ways, indicative of a new norm. That’s because 2025 wasn’t like other years. This was the year that gadgets went all-in on AI slop.

Open the AI floodgates

If you’ve noticed an influx of AI features in your gadgets this year, you’re not alone. More than any other year, 2025 was a time for integration. According to Anshel Sag, an analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy, there’s a reason for that.

“Fundamentally, companies have to justify these investments,†Sag told Gizmodo. “Google is making huge investments. OpenAI is making huge investments. Silicon vendors are committing real space to AI. Apple has AI accelerators and GPUs now. ARM is coming soon after that. People have to put up or shut up with AI right now.â€

The adoption seemed to hit the spectrum, too. There were all of Google’s devices that I already mentioned, but probably the biggest indicator was its Pixel 10 with AI features that materially alter your photos and deepfake your voice for translation purposes, and predictive tools like “Magic Cue†that are meant to surface important information before you even ask for it.

In TVs, there was LG with its Copilot feature meant to help surface and search content. Wireless earbuds got in on the trend with transcription and ChatGPT-enabled voice assistants. Microsoft drew almost no boundaries with Copilot by shoving the chatbot into every possible crevice of Windows 11. Meta, for its part in the AI-ification of hardware, loaded its Ray-Ban smart glasses with computer vision via its voice assistant, Meta AI.

And gaming didn’t escape without a touch of AI, either. Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot is an AI tool meant to instruct players with walkthroughs on boss battles and strategies for competitive gaming that can be used across various pieces of hardware, from PCs to Xbox. Smart speakers also notably leaned into the generative AI of it all, with Google rolling out Gemini for Home and Amazon centering its new Echo speakers around Alexa+, its new voice assistant with a dash of a large language model (LLM) like those used in ChatGPT.

Logic would dictate that the reason for this sudden influx of AI features is that consumers are responding positively to their inclusion, though, in this case, logic might not be the thing to go on. Remember that LG TV integration with Microsoft Copilot I mentioned? Yeah, well, LG quickly rolled that back after backlash, eventually allowing people to delete the feature completely. There’s also anecdotal evidence that Gemini for Home and Alexa+ are failing to win consumers over with their initial efforts, too. Just take one quick scan of the Google Home Reddit, and you’ll see a slew of complaints, and having used Gemini for Home myself, I get it. Some things are improved, sure, but not enough to justify a supposed “next-gen†billing.

Microsoft is also struggling to get users of Windows 11 and Windows-based PCs to gravitate to Copilot, too. Take a short stroll through the comments on this X post from Windows chief Pavan Davuluri about Microsoft’s efforts to make Windows 11 into “an agentic OS†and tell me if you see a trend. I’ll give you a hint: the feedback is not what I would call positive.

Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at #MSIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Windows and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!…

— Pavan Davuluri (@pavandavuluri) November 10, 2025

These initial stumbles seem to be corroborated by polling on the topic, too. According to a survey by Pew Research from September, sentiments about AI skewed towards grim, with only 10% of respondents reporting that they were “more excited than concerned†about AI, though the vast majority (three-quarters surveyed) said they’d be willing to let AI assist in day-to-day tasks a little bit.

As Sag notes, the tepid and sometimes averse response could be due in part to the fact that people don’t yet know what they want out of AI.

“In an early market, the consumer is woefully unaware of what’s possible,†Sag says. “So they, they kind of say, ‘We don’t need this,’ until they, they have it and they’re like, ‘Okay, well actually I do need this.’â€

But that’s not the whole picture. There’s also the issue of marketing. While consumer sentiments towards AI are skeptical at best, the reaction from tech companies towards AI has been enthusiastic, and in some cases, Sag says, companies have “overpromised and underdelivered.†Microsoft, for example, is claiming that Windows 11 is an “agentic†operating system, but the results haven’t really been immediately palpable for users.

“It’s agentic in its aspirations, but is it really agentic in its execution? That’s really the problem: a lot of companies aspire to be certain things in AI and market them as such, but in reality, they’re far from it,†Sag says. “I think that has always been the biggest risk with AI: the over-promise and the under-deliver.â€

Despite all the zeal, generative AI is still variable and unproven, even if it can be useful at times. Standards are high for gadgets and software nowadays, and when something doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, there’s a word that gets tossed around a lot: slop. The word slop gets thrown around so much now that editors at Merriam-Webster actually anointed the term as the “word of the year.â€

AI-generated content is arguably the most popular target for that particular insult, but gadgets aren’t immune to the same criticism, since the software is the way we interface with hardware. Smart glasses, according to Sag, could be a prime example.

“ I have to use Meta AI a lot for all of the smart glasses I have, and I hate that when I open the app—it’s not my glasses interface,†Sag says. “It’s a Meta AI video feed, which literally nobody wants, but they’re trying to push.â€

Combine the taste of AI slop with general skepticism and multiply that by the fact that people aren’t super jazzed about the immense toll AI datacenters are taking on resources (water, for example), and you’ve got a recipe for bad PR.

â€The problem with AI slop is that it just cheapens what AI can do,†Sag says. “I definitely use it from time to time to be silly, but generally speaking, it’s kind of a waste of resources for a lot of people, and it does not help with the perception of AI.â€

Slop ’til you drop

No one has a crystal ball, but most anyone with any notions of the way AI is going is expecting the needle to move even further in the year ahead. It’s not just software, according to Sag, AI features will also expand the world of gadgets as well.

“ I think we’re going to see more AI features, but I think it’s also going to be more AI form factors, and that will drive demand for more features,†he says.

On that front, there are already early indications that we can expect more AI-centric gadgets in the year ahead. A joint venture from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, and former Apple design guru Jony Ive, for example, is promising to give us… something? An AI wearable of some kind is the best guess, but there’s no concrete word on what shape the duo’s device will ultimately take.

I’m no analyst, but I tend to agree. The AI train is still full speed ahead, and companies like Meta, for example, are spending huge sums, not just on the compute power and servers needed to process AI features, but on individual researchers and engineers tasked with implementing AI and pushing the envelope further. Meta paid one AI researcher, Matt Deitke, a staggering $250 million this year to push its AI agenda. That’s just one person.

And while Microsoft is slowing down its investments in AI datacenters, companies like Google might actually be gaining a foothold. Sales of its Pixel 10 device, for example, have been surprisingly strong. It’s hard to attribute that directly to its full embrace of AI with any degree of certainty, but Google has undoubtedly made a concerted effort to focus its AI features on practical tools like photo editing or helping you more easily surface information like flight times or dinner reservations.

In the Pixel 10’s feature set, there’s a glimmer of the “agentic†future that companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are promising, but the real question is whether those titans can string together those segmented tools in a coherent way that resonates with users and the way they want to use their devices.

“[AI] needs to be implemented in a way that’s actually meaningful,†Sag says. “People want sharper images. People want easier photo editing. People want, you know, better noise cancellation. They don’t want AI slop.â€