Katie Notopoulos

Katie Notopoulos is a senior correspondent at Business Insider who covers the intersection of technology, business, and culture, with a focus on how consumer tech and artificial intelligence reshape everyday life online and off. Her coverage stands out for treating platforms, gadgets, and algorithms as social forces, often through first-person reporting that tests new tools and exposes their unintended consequences.

AI slop and the texture of online culture

Notopoulos has made “AI slop” a recurring lens for understanding how generative tools are flooding feeds with low-quality, surreal content and what comes after the initial shock. In pieces such as “AI Slop Is Coming for Your Kids” and “AI Slop Like ‘Shrimp Jesus’ Is Over. Here’s What Comes Next,” she tracks how meme-like AI images evolve, who creates them, and how audiences move from fascination to fatigue.

She writes about TikTok and other platforms as distribution channels for this material, treating them less as neutral pipes and more as environments shaping what children and adults see every day.

Her framing treats the spread of AI-generated photos and videos as a cultural story rather than a purely technical one, linking odd viral artifacts to deeper shifts in taste, attention, and trust online. Even when the subject is a single bizarre image, she uses it to ask what authenticity means when almost anything can be fabricated and amplified at scale.

Parenting, kids, and the new tech backlash

A distinctive strand in Notopoulos’ work follows how parents, children, and schools are grappling with AI and classroom technology. In “The AI backlash has a new battleground: kindergarten,” she reports on school-issued Chromebooks and AI-powered tools in early education, highlighting tensions between administrators pushing new software and parents wary of its effects on young kids. She explicitly invites experiences from parents and educators, signaling that her reporting depends on real classroom stories rather than abstract policy debates.

In “Don’t outsource the best parts of parenting to AI,” she examines the allure of AI helpers for busy families and argues that offloading too much emotional labor to machines erodes the core of parent-child relationships. That theme carries through to her coverage of AI slop aimed at kids, where she connects the design of feeds and recommendation systems to questions of care, responsibility, and the basic quality of content children consume. Across these pieces, parenting is treated as a frontline where the promises of AI meet the practical realities of raising and teaching children.

Hands-on reporting with AI tools and gadgets

Notopoulos regularly puts new technologies in her own hands and builds stories around what happens when they collide with ordinary life. In her review of the voice-to-text app Wispr Flow, she describes a “hot-mic” moment that nearly ruined her life, using that incident to explore privacy, miscommunication, and the risks of having a transcription tool always listening. A similar approach shapes her coverage of Meta’s camera-free AI Ray-Ban glasses, where she situates the product in the broader debate over “pervert glasses” and wearable surveillance while still dissecting how the device actually feels to use.

Her piece on Amazon’s AI-generated podcasts, described as “the world’s least necessary podcast,” turns a mundane product test into a critique of automation for its own sake. She treats these stories as reported essays, combining product details with narrative scenes and clear judgments about when a tool genuinely solves a problem and when it adds noise. Across gadgets, apps, and AI services, the emphasis is on lived experience: how features work in practice, how they fail, and what those failures reveal about the direction of tech.

Platforms, search, and the future of the internet

Another pillar of Notopoulos’ work looks at large platforms and search as gatekeepers for what people see, know, and enjoy online. In “Google AI Overviews Had the Last Laugh in 2025,” she charts how Google’s AI-generated search answers improved after an initial backlash, explaining why the feature ended up working better and what that means for the classic search-results page.

She has also written directly about Google’s broader changes to search, warning about how new interfaces could disrupt the basic experience of finding information on the internet.

Her story “TikTok Is Kind of Bad Now, Right?” treats the platform’s For You Page as a cultural barometer, arguing that shifts in recommendation quality and content mix have made the app feel more boring and less serendipitous. In “The Zuckermoon is over,” she applies a similar lens to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, exploring how the initial enthusiasm around his projects gives way to a more skeptical public mood. Pieces like “How Typos Became the New Status Symbol” show her interest in small behavioral signals - intentional typos, stylistic sloppiness - as clues to status, authenticity, and power in digital culture, sometimes pulling in high-profile scandals to illustrate how these norms play out.

Together, this body of work positions her as a critic of platform decisions, with attention to both the technical change and the everyday texture of using the internet.

Beat, format, and background

Across these areas, Notopoulos writes about technology, business, and culture as a single, connected beat rather than separate domains. Her stories often blend analysis with reporting, moving between interviews, personal experience, and clear explanation of how a product or feature works. She is described by the masthead as a senior correspondent covering technology and business, and her portfolio shows a consistent focus on AI, social media platforms, consumer hardware, and the cultural implications of tech design.

Before joining Business Insider, she reported on technology for BuzzFeed News and wrote for outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, Fast Company, and MIT Technology Review, building a background in internet culture and emerging tech. That history informs her current work, which treats tech stories as cultural stories first, grounded in how real people use tools, navigate platforms, and raise children in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms.