The early days of artificial intelligence-powered content creation brought with it a ton of digital garbage. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time on X or any other social media platform lately, you probably know what we’re talking about.
In recent years, so many images and videos have been made inappropriately that it has become its own term. Now we call it “slop.”
The word’s prevalence throughout 2025 led Merriam-Webster to designate slop as its word of the year. According to a famous American dictionary, slop is defined as “low-quality digital content, usually produced in large quantities by artificial intelligence.”
“With all the talk about the AI threat of 2025, Slop is less frightening and more mocking,” Merriam-Webster said in a blog post on Sunday. “This phrase sends a bit of a message to AI, which sometimes seems too superintelligent when it comes to replacing human creativity.”
The language expert explained that this year’s deluge of sloppy content consists of fake news, trash books written by AI, a few talking cats, and many other ridiculous videos and creations.
Greg Barlow, president of Merriam-Webster, described slop as a combination of glamor, annoyance, and ridiculousness. In the past, hearing this word associated people with feeding pigs, doing their own “sloppy” work, and not caring about their clothes.
Cat on duty pic.twitter.com/BGaMzgbF9T
— AI Slop (@AIslop_) December 15, 2025
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Merriam-Webster isn’t alone.
Similarly, the Australian English Macquarie Dictionary selected ‘AI slop’ as this solar traveler’s word of the year. McCauley defines this as “low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by users.”
This language expert says slop will definitely be added to the English language for years to come. A graphic of trash bags piled up on a computer monitor was used on the dictionary’s website to depict the contents of this type of trash.
“Now, in 2025, we know what slop means: AI-generated slop, devoid of any meaningful content or use,” McCauley explained.
“In recent years, we have learned to become search engineers to find meaningful information, but we need to become nimble engineers to overcome the challenges of AI.”
Early video creation tools like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 are contributing significantly to the AI onslaught the world has been exposed to recently. OpenAI has also led the way in sloppy image creation through its ChatGPT and DALL-E models. Additionally, Midjourney and Qwen of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd – ADR (NYSE: BABA) (LON: 0HCI) are also notable contributors.
They may produce a fair amount of quality material, but they also spew out a ton of junk that floods the internet. AI has reshaped the digital landscape, both positively and negatively.
Why every time I look at Facebook I see a new AI slop video by Snoop Dogg pic.twitter.com/IMNVQWjnW7
— Taoki (@justalexoki) December 13, 2025
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