In brief
- “Slop” has evolved from literal waste to shorthand for mass-produced, AI-written content that looks finished but says little.
- The term reflects unease with writing that is correct, neutral, and repetitive, yet lacking insight or voice.
- Merriam-Webster notes a rise in user searches for the term.
In what many observers might characterize as both ironic and, in some respects, entirely predictable, Merriam-Webster has named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year—a term increasingly used to describe large volumes of low-quality digital content generated at scale, by artificial intelligence.
It’s not that this content is incorrect; it’s that it is correct in ways that feel strangely beside the point and obviously AI-written.
Slop is not a new word, nor a particularly complex one. Historically, it referred to soft mud, liquid waste, or unappetizing mixtures of uncertain origin. In today’s digital context—where meanings evolve, overlap, and occasionally blur—the term has been repurposed to describe a growing unease about the sheer quantity of material now circulating online, much of it competent on the surface and hollow beneath it.
This content—which may include articles, posts, captions, summaries, and explainers—tends to share familiar traits. It is grammatically sound, tonally neutral, and heavily qualified. It explains ideas carefully, sometimes repeatedly, as if clarity alone might substitute for insight.
It’s not just that it uses lots of em dashes—it also uses occasionally incoherent negative parallelisms. The result is writing that looks finished while remaining oddly unfinished.
Likewise, AI-generated slop uses plenty of infantile emojis and bullet points to explain things to easily distracted readers. It’s:
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🤖 Produced quickly and at scale
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🔁 Repetitive in structure and phrasing
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😐 And confident in tone regardless of depth
At its core—and it is worth acknowledging how often that phrase appears in discussions like this—slop reflects a shift from scarcity to abundance, from deliberate creation to automated output. That shift has brought content saturation, reader fatigue, and a growing difficulty in telling the difference between work that was made thoughtfully and work that was simply generated.
Critics—in AI slop those critics are never named, and sometimes hallucinated—argue this material flattens voice and trains algorithms on their own sameness. Supporters—ditto—counter that it lowers barriers and mirrors patterns long present in human writing. Both views are frequently cited, sometimes in the same breath.
In the end, Merriam-Webster’s choice of “slop” functions as both diagnosis and example—a word for an era defined by scale, automation, and an uneasy mix of efficiency and emptiness. Still, the growing awareness of the problem may itself be encouraging, suggesting that readers know what they’re looking at, even if they keep reading it anyway.
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