"On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that "slop" is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term 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 "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.""
""It's such an illustrative word," 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 ridiculous." To select its Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster's editors review data on which words rose in search volume and usage, then reach consensus on which term best captures the year."
Merriam-Webster selected 'slop' as its 2025 Word of the Year to label low-quality, mass-produced AI-generated digital content pervasive across social media, search results, and the broader web. The dictionary defines slop as 'digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.' Merriam-Webster president Greg Barlow described the term as illustrative of AI's transformative presence and noted mixed public reactions of fascination, annoyance, and ridicule. Editors used search volume and usage data to choose the word, citing a spike in queries as evidence of growing public awareness of fake or shoddy content. Other dictionaries have tracked AI-driven lexical change, with Cambridge naming 'hallucinate' in 2023 and Oxford choosing 'rage bait.'
Read at Ars Technica
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