Merriam-Webster “slop” for the dictionary company’s 2025 word of the year. The leading lexicographers define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” We’ve seen an absolute deluge of AI slop this year, from to . Not even food delivery like could escape the onslaught of AI-generated garbage that no one asked for.
It’s gotten to the point that half the videos my well-meaning parents send me on social media are AI-generated videos of dogs. This isn’t all that surprising given how very intentionally the social media giants have .
Merriam-Webster rightly points out the somewhat mocking nature of calling it “slop.” “Like slime, sludge and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was ‘soft mud.’ In the 1800s it came to mean ‘food waste’ (as in ‘pig slop’), and then more generally, ‘rubbish’ or ‘a product of little or no value,'” the dictionary distributors wrote.
As the proliferation of AI slop expanded, some platforms like and got wise and began offering users the choice to tone down the sheer amount of it in their feeds. Even Spotify is at to combat some of this stuff now, though that didn’t stop an from going unnoticed on the platform for weeks. Elsewhere, companies like Google leaned in, Veo 3-generated videos into YouTube Shorts. We’ll only be able to tell in hindsight if 2025 was the peak of AI slop, but for now it shows no signs of abating.
Merriam-Webster highlighted some other words for the year (some of which the chronically online will be familiar with), including Gerrymander, Touch Grass, Performative, Tariff, Conclave and Six Seven.
