AI slop, the colloquial term for low-effort AI-generated content, has emerged as a huge problem across different industries. Music labels are fighting streaming services to put an AI label on such tra/cks. Publishing houses are wary of AI-written drafts. Research journals are buried under a deluge of AI-generated papers. The software industry is reeling under the pressure of vibe-coded apps brimming with security flaws. Even Apple is struggling against a tide of bug reports created using AI. Of course, the disdain against AI is pretty obvious, but there’s now a new dimension to it.
Boomers are gifting AI-generated books to their grandkids.
“She is creating these storylines based on experiences with my kid and modeling her characters to have similar attributes as my kid, and us[ing] our family’s first names so that they represent us and my kid will ‘see her family reflected,'” an individual wrote on Reddit, detailing how their mother was using AI to make stories for their grandkids, influenced by real-life events.
Multiple parents told WIRED that their kids have received AI-generated story books from grand parents or other senior family members, labelling the trend as “morally reprehensible.” The trend is horrific. I have seen numerous AI-generated books targeted at kids selling on online marketplaces, and even advertisements for tools that use AI to write notes and tributes for real humans.
Ironically, the support for such behaviour comes from AI giants that also own the world’s biggest channels for distrubuting digital content in all shapes and forms. One such source is Amazon, which also runs Kindle as one of the world’s largest digital books platforms.
As far back as 2024, it was reported that Amazon’s store has an AI slop book problem. Poor, AI-written copies of popular books have flooded the ecommerce platform. In the most recent incident that got plenty of coverage in online circles just three weeks ago, Kashmir Hill, a technology journalist at The New York Times, wrote an account of how someone used AI to write her biography and put it for sale on Amazon.
Here is the fun part. You would think that Amazon must be drafting harsh anti-AI policies by now. Well, Amazon is actually adding more fuel to the fire. All the way back in 2022, Amazon released an AI feature called “Create with Alexa,” which lets users create bedtime stories for kids, complete with visuals and animations. In 2026, Amazon rolled out a similar feature that lets you create podcasts on any topic using the Alexa AI assistant.
Platforms like YouTube are also seeing a tsunami of AI-generated brainrot content targeted at kids. It’s pretty odd (and disheartening) to see that the biggest platforms for digital content in varied forms are also owned by companies that are doing cutting-edge work and pushing AI into our lives from every direction.
Amazon should be the guardian of books (on Kindle and its eponymous store for physical books), films and TV shows (through Prime Video) and songs (via Amazon Music). Google and Meta are in a similar position, but once again, they are likely not going to take these AI problems hitting close to home as responsibly as they should.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.