The early days of artificial intelligence-powered content creation have brought a great deal of digital garbage with them. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time on X or other social media platforms lately you surely know what we’re talking about.
There has been so much of it over the past couple of years that the variety of poorly-created images and videos has garnered its own term. We now refer to it as “slop.”
The word’s widespread popularity throughout 2025 has even prompted Merriam-Webster to designate slop as its Word of the Year. Slop is defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” according to the renowned American dictionary.
“In 2025, amid all the talk about AI threats, slop set a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking,” Merriam-Webster stated in a blog posting on Sunday. “The word sends a little message to AI: when it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes you don’t seem too superintelligent.”
The linguistic expert explained that this year’s flood of sloppy content was comprised of fake news, garbage AI-written books, several talking cats and many other ridiculous videos and creations.
Merriam-Webster’s President, Greg Barlow, has described slop as being a combination of fascinating, annoying and ridiculous. Previously, the term would bring pig food or a lack of caring about one’s “sloppy” labour or attire to mind.
cat of duty pic.twitter.com/BGaMzgbF9T
— AI Slop (@AIslop_) December 15, 2025
Read more: McDonald’s pulls Grinchy AI-made Christmas ad after avalanche of complaints
Merriam-Webster isn’t the only one
Similarly, the Australian-English Macquarie Dictionary chose “AI slop” as its word of the year during this trip around the sun. Macquarie defines it as “low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user.”
This language specialist says that slop is sure to be a robust addition to the English language for years to come. A graphic showing a computer monitor with a pile of trash bags on it was used to depict this kind of trashy material on the dictionary’s website.
“We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use,” Macquarie described.
“While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop.”
Early-stage video creation tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have been significant contributors to the onslaught of AI slop the world has been exposed to recently. OpenAI has also been leading the charge with sloppy image creation via its ChatGPT and DALL-E models. Additionally, Midjourney and Qwen from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd – ADR (NYSE: BABA) (LON: 0HCI) have been contributors of note.
They may generate a considerable amount of quality material, but they also spit out a great deal of junk that floods the internet. AI has been reshaping the digital landscape in positive and negative ways.
why is it that every time i go on facebook there's a new ai slop video by snoop dogg pic.twitter.com/IMNVQWjnW7
— taoki (@justalexoki) December 13, 2025
Read more: Wonder Studios raises US$12M in seed for AI film production
Follow Rowan Dunne on LinkedIn
rowan@mugglehead.com
