Kicker: Revealing words

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NICK EICHER, HOST: In the spirit of December 31st content, a late entry for 2025 words of the year. Cambridge has chosen parasocial, that’s the one-sided social bonds people might form with fictional figures, possibly even AI creations. Then Merriam-Webster with its entry, a close cousin to parasocial.

AUDIO: [Slop montage]

AI slop, terrible, fake content, mostly found on social media.

So, if you put that together with parasocial, along with an earlier entry we told you about several days ago, “rage bait”, well, that points to something like the same problem: users digging through all that slop trying to find something real.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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