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Merriam-Webster picks "slop" as word of the year

by · Boing Boing

Slop, referring to polished but uncanny, derivative or mediocre AI-generated content, is Merriam-Webster's word of the year. The top U.S. English dictionary chose the term to reflect what website users search the most.

Here's its definition: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, "workslop" reports that waste coworkers' time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up.

Slop beat gerrymander, performative, tariff, conclave, and "six seven." Past winners include "pandemic" and "vaccine." Also honored by Merriam-Webster was Lake Char­gog­ga­gogg­man­chaug­ga­gogg­chau­bu­na­gun­ga­maugg, receiving attention due to the real-life lake becoming a location in a popular computer game.

The Wikipedia article for "AI Slop" offers plenty of examples and puts it in context.

A24 received similar backlash for releasing a series of AI-generated posters for the 2024 film Civil War. One poster appears to depict a group of soldiers in a tank-like raft preparing to fire on a large swan, an image which does not resemble the events of the film.
A now-retracted paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology included this slop mouse

Previously:
• 'Rage bait' is the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year
• 'Vibe Coding' is Collins' Dictionary word of the year