There used to be a time when keeping up with the latest movies, games, music and media in general was a simple matter of watching a few shows and clicking a few links. Now there's a new canceled celeb, Tubi original, nepo baby or TikTok star debuting almost daily. 

Watercooler talk has turned from who was on The Tonight Show to what's going viral online. Right now, one of the most famous dudes in America is a 20-something snake wrangler who just won a reality game show by betraying a real housewife of Beverly Hills. If that sentence angered and confused you, this is the right guide.

Here's how to use AI to keep up with popular culture.

Customized results

Not everyone cares about the same pop culture stuff as everyone else. You might be very invested in the Oscars, while the person next to you couldn't care less. Aggregators like Apple News and Google Trends deal in the space of mass appeal, and mostly meet people in the middle when it comes to pop culture headlines. 

I asked Google Gemini to use my Chrome history and our previous chats to generate a quick hit list of headlines and short details around pop culture that I would find interesting. It gave me a short bullet list tailored to my preferences of horror and folklore, as well as my background in entertainment and my love of gaming.

Follow the right people

Media and pop culture trends have migrated their spawn points to specific parts of the internet and even more specific social accounts. If you're still hoping to get the latest news on breakups, shakeups and shutouts in the pop culture world directly from the good people at a Penske publication, prepare to be the last to know. 

Instagram has been integrated with AI learning features that provide suggestions on who you should follow (just try to stop it!), but you'll need to do a little more legwork to find the accounts across social platforms that will keep you abreast of the never-ending stuff, like Hollywood shapeshifters and Sims 4 updates.

I turned to Gemini again to see if it could provide me with an actually useful list of follow suggestions across all the social platforms on which I'm active for topics I've shown to be important to me. It gave me some bullet points on who to follow across the categories of horror and folklore, gardening and nature, Japanese language and culture, writing and film industry, and gaming. Here are some of them:

Connect the dots

You may not care about Justin Bieber's laptop YouTube karaoke set at Coachella this past weekend, but you probably heard a little something about the strange performance. Even if you think you're above petty gossip, we are all connected in the great circle of cancel culture, whether we like it or not.

AI tools like Google Gemini can generate comprehensive breakdowns of what's happening in pop culture land and help you understand the new and frightening language associated with these events.

I asked Gemini to give me a 360-degree look at the debate over whether Bieber's Coachella performance was genius or lazy.

I also asked Gemini to explain to me the terms "looksmaxxing," "mogging" and "subhuman" as they relate to the wave of thin young men with chiseled jawlines like Bieber and Timothée Chalamet.

I feel more informed about the whole thing, but honestly, at what cost?

Keep in mind, as always, that AI systems have been known to hallucinate and even generate completely fake headlines to fill space, so make sure you look at the sources of the pop culture rundowns they generate before publicly repeating what you've read.