The impact of AI on our social media feeds has not gone unnoticed by one of America’s top dictionaries. Amid the onslaught of content that has swept the web over the past 12 months, Merriam-Webster announced on Sunday that 2025’s word of the year is “slop.”
According to the dictionary, the term is defined as “low-quality digital content, typically produced in large quantities by artificial intelligence.”
“Like slime, sludge, and mud, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop seeps into everything,” the dictionary says, adding that in an age of AI anxiety, it’s a term coined to convey “an air of less fear and mockery” towards technology.
Greg Barlow, president of Merriam-Webster, told The Associated Press: “It’s a really straightforward term.” “This is part of AI, which is a transformative technology, and something that people find fascinating, annoying, and a little silly.”
The word “slop” was certainly thrown around a lot this year, as journalists and commentators tried to explain how platforms like OpenAI’s Sora and Google Gemini’s Veo are transforming the internet. Thanks to this new kind of media generator, AI-generated books, podcasts, pop songs, TV commercials, and even entire movies are now being created. A study in May found that nearly 75% of all new web content in the previous month involved some form of AI.
These new tools are even creating a situation known as the “slop economy,” where excess AI-generated content is milked for advertising dollars. Critics worry that this trend is further polarizing the digital community, dividing those who can buy high-quality content protected by paywalls from those who can only buy a digital diet with, as you might imagine, very little informational value.
But “slop” has also been used to describe the impact of AI on a variety of areas less associated with traditional media consumption, such as cybersecurity reporting, legal briefings, and university papers. The implications are far-reaching, to say the least.
On a related note, technology-related words are big winners in this year’s WOTY (Word of the Year) category. Macquarie Dictionary has already defeated Merriam-Webster to make ‘AI slop’ its term of the year, while Oxford Dictionary chose ‘rage bait’. Collins Dictionary used the term “vibe coding”.
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