In 2025, generative AI exploded, divided, and created trust issues

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

2025 started with a bang for the AI industry.

In January, the emergence of a cheaper Chinese rival to ChatGPT — DeepSeek — caused chaos on the stock markets, as U.S. companies realized they weren't the only players in the game. But Deepseek’s dominance was short-lived, partly because of its ties to China and censorship.

Trust seemed to be the main concern. “AI chatbots, in general, are amazing, and it speaks, if that's the word, with complete confidence, but in some cases, it's giving you completely mistaken information and presenting it as the truth,” said Ian Leslie, an author on human behavior, earlier this year.

Then, there's the thorny issue of artificial intelligence and the arts, which has been in the spotlight more than ever, not least because of Sora 2, which can create eerily realistic-looking videos of pretty much anything you can imagine at the click of a button, which was released in September.

It made so-called “AI slop” easier than ever to make, but there were big concerns about copyright. According to Gary Marcus, a New York University professor who writes on AI, it marked a fundamental shift for society.

“It leaves us in a society that's going to have trust issues, because I think people are going to learn that you can't really trust video anymore, but we don't really have a replacement,“ he said. “We don't have a source of ground truth that people share, and I think that's going to be disruptive for society.”

The big AI firms are still facing lawsuits from all around the world, largely from the people who own the copyright to the material their models are trained on, and it's playing out in a big way in the world of music.

Because if you ask an AI generator to make you a song that sounds say, like Ed Sheeran, some would argue that Ed Sheeran deserves some compensation.

It's an issue that came to a head when big record labels, including Warner, sued the AI music app Suno. That is, until Warner changed its mind and decided to work with them instead. Many in the music world were outraged.

But some see it differently. Grammy-nominated producer Jamie Rodigan said others see the app not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

“I enjoy using AI in the creative process,” he said. “If I start writing a piece of music and need an idea or maybe some harmonies, I may upload a track to AI, and AI throws me back some different variations of different examples of how the track could develop.”

In short: AI is polarizing, problematic, and fraught with risks. But if 2025 proved anything, it's that AI isn't going away.