Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the abuse gets bad enough that a major dictionary takes notice, you know it’s become a cultural phenomenon.
On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 word of the year, reflecting how the word has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary defines slop as “low quality digital content that is produced in quantity, usually through artificial intelligence.”
“It’s an illustrative term,” Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow told The Associated Press. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit funny.”
To select their Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster editors review data to determine which words grew in search volume and usage, then reach a consensus on which word best reflects the year. Barlow told the AP that the increase in searches for “slop” reflects a growing awareness among users that they are encountering fake or substandard content online.
Dictionaries have been tracking the impact of AI on language for the past few years, with Cambridge choosing “hallucinate” as the 2023 word of the year due to the tendency of AI models to generate plausible-but-false information (longtime AR readers will be happy to hear that the dictionary even has another word for it).
This trend extends to online culture in general, which has matured with new coins. This year, Oxford University Press chose “anger bait”, referring to content designed to provoke anger for engagement. The Cambridge Dictionary selected “parasocial”, describing one-sided relationships between fans and celebrities or influencers.
Difference between baby and bath water
As the AP points out, the word “slop” originally came into English in the 1700s to mean soft soil. By the 1800s, it had evolved to describe food waste fed to pigs, and eventually came to mean trash or low-value products. The new AI-related definition builds on that history of describing something unwanted and unpleasant.
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