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AI\u2019s impact on our social media feeds has not gone unnoticed by one of America\u2019s top dictionaries. Amidst the onslaught of content that has swept the web over the past twelve months, Merriam-Webster announced Sunday that its word of the year for 2025 is \u201cslop.\u201d<\/p>\n
The dictionary defines the term<\/a> as \u201cdigital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cLike slime<\/em>, sludge<\/em>, and muck<\/em>, slop<\/em> has the wet sound of something you don\u2019t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything,\u201d the dictionary writes, adding that, in an age of AI anxiety, it is a term designed to communicate \u201ca tone that\u2019s less fearful, more mocking\u201d of the technology.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s such an illustrative word,\u201d Merriam-Webster\u2019s president, Greg Barlow, told The Associated Press. \u201cIt\u2019s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it\u2019s something that people have found fascinating, annoying, and a little bit ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n The word \u201cslop\u201d has certainly been everywhere this year, as journalists and commentators have sought to describe the ways in which platforms like OpenAI\u2019s Sora<\/a> and Google Gemini\u2019s Veo<\/a> are transforming the internet. Thanks to this new breed of media generator, there are now AI-generated books, podcasts, pop songs, TV commercials\u2014even entire movies. One study in May claimed that<\/a> nearly 75 percent of all new web content from the previous month had involved some kind of AI.<\/p>\n These new tools have even led to what has been dubbed a \u201cslop economy,\u201d in which gluts of AI-generated content can be milked for advertising money<\/a>. Critics worry that<\/a> this trend is further polarizing digital communities, dividing them up into those who can afford paywalled, higher-quality content, and those who can only afford a digital diet of slop, which\u2014as you might imagine\u2014can be quite light on informational value.\u00a0<\/p>\n But \u201cslop\u201d has also been used to describe AI\u2019s impact on a large variety of fields that don\u2019t have much to do with traditional media consumption, including cybersecurity reports<\/a>, legal briefings<\/a>, and the college essay<\/a>, among other things. Its impact is broad, to say the least. <\/p>\n