Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the misuse becomes so severe that a major dictionary notices it, you know it has become a cultural phenomenon.
On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that word “slop” became the word of the year in 2025, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across the world. social mediasearch results and the Internet in general. The dictionary defines slop as “low-quality digital content that is typically produced in large quantities using artificial intelligence.”
“It’s such a telling word,” Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow. said Associated Press. “It's part of transformative artificial intelligence technology, and people find it fascinating, annoying and a little funny.”
To select a Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster editors review data on which words have grown in search volume and usage, and then reach a consensus on which term best represents the year. Barlow told the AP that the surge in searches for the word “sucks” reflects a growing awareness among users that they are encountering fake or low-quality content online.
Dictionaries have been tracking the impact of artificial intelligence on language over the past few years. selected The word of 2023 will be “hallucination” due to trend artificial intelligence models to generate plausible but false information (longtime Ars readers will be glad to hear that there is another term for this word in the dictionary).
This trend extends to online culture as a whole, which is replete with new coins. This year Oxford University Press chose “rage bait” is content designed to provoke anger into participation. Cambridge Dictionary selected “parasocial”, describing one-sided relationships between fans and celebrities or influencers.
Difference between baby and bath water
As the AP notes, the word “slop” originally entered the English language in the 1700s to mean soft mud. By the 1800s, it came to refer to food scraps fed to pigs and eventually came to mean garbage or food of little value. The new definition associated with AI is based on the history of describing something unwanted and unpleasant.
