Merriam-Webster, a well-known American dictionary publisher, announced that the word "slop" will be named the word of the year in 2025, which refers to the large amount of low-quality digital content that has swept the Internet driven by artificial intelligence in the past year. The word is defined in the dictionary as “low-quality digital content, often mass-generated by artificial intelligence,” to summarize the ubiquity of AI artifacts in social media and cyberspace today.
The dictionary pointed out in the explanation that the word "slop", like "slime", "sludge" and "muck", has a "wet" texture, which makes people instinctively feel disgusted, and vividly conveys the "not wanting to touch but pervasive" characteristics of this content. In an era of widespread anxiety about AI, Merriam-Webster believes that "slop" is an expression of irony rather than pure fear, forming a rather playful response to the technology itself. Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow said in an interview with The Associated Press, "It's a very visual word, closely related to AI, a technology that is reshaping the world, and people are fascinated by it, bored by it, and also find it a bit ridiculous."
In the past year, the word “slop” has appeared frequently in various reports and comments, and has been used to describe how content generation platforms such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google Gemini’s Veo are changing the Internet ecosystem. With the help of this new generation of media generation tools, AI has begun to mass-produce books, podcasts, pop songs, TV commercials, and even entire movies. A study released in May even claimed that nearly 75% of newly generated online content in the previous month involved artificial intelligence in some way.
Along with the rise of these tools, there is also the so-called "slop economy": platforms harvest advertising revenue by piling up AI-generated content, thus forming a model of profit-making from "information dross" as raw material. Critics worry that this trend is further tearing digital communities apart, dividing users between those who can afford high-quality paid content and those who can only consume free "slop," which is often quite poor in information value and fact density.
The term "slop" has been used far beyond the traditional media consumption field, and is also widely used to describe the impact of AI on other industries, including network security reports, legal documents, college papers and many other scenarios. These fields are filled with “reports,” “analyses,” and “assignments” of varying quality that are quickly put together by AI, further exacerbating challenges to professional judgment and academic integrity.
It is worth mentioning that in this year’s “Word of the Year” selection, technology-related words performed well overall. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary named "AI slop" as the word of the year earlier than Merriam-Webster; Oxford Dictionary selected "ragebait" (bait content with the purpose of irritating emotions); Collins Dictionary (Collins) listed "vibe coding" as the word of the year, reflecting that topics such as AI, algorithmic content, and emotional manipulation have become unavoidable themes in today's public discourse.