Merriam-Webster's word of the year is AI 'slop'

If you have spent any time online this year, you know the feeling of drowning in uncanny video clips, weird generated ads, and endlessly talking cats.

Now, Merriam-Webster has officially crowned the defining phenomenon of 2025: slop.

The dictionary defines slop as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." In just four letters, it captures the overwhelming deluge that has washed over our screens.

From pig feed to internet feeds

The term itself has deep roots. In the 1700s, slop meant soft mud. By the 1800s, it came to describe food waste and livestock feed, before expanding into generic slang for worthless junk.

Fast forward to 2025, and tools like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo have turned the internet into a playground for cheap, high-speed synthetic media. By May, one study claimed that nearly 75% of all new web content created in the previous month involved AI in some way.

Everything from auto-generated Amazon books and synthetic pop tracks to bloated corporate slide decks now carries the label. Merriam-Webster president Greg Barlow noted to the AP that the word reflects how people find AI transformative, annoying, and often ridiculous.

Other dictionaries saw the same tech tidal wave. Macquarie Dictionary went with AI slop, Oxford picked ragebait, and Collins crowned vibe coding.

Why it matters

We think the real significance of slop winning word of the year is an emotional vibe shift.

For two years, the AI narrative was dominated by existential awe and workplace dread. Slop, by contrast, takes the wind out of the industry's sails. Instead of trembling before an all-knowing superintelligence, people are laughing at the digital junk clogging their feeds.

For creators and platforms, it marks a serious warning sign. A so-called slop economy has emerged to farm ad dollars, but user tolerance is running out. The web is rapidly fracturing into paywalled, human-crafted gardens on one side and algorithmically produced wastelands on the other.

If AI labs keep flooding the zone without solving quality and trust, their tools risk being remembered not as the future of human creativity, but as the world's most efficient spam cannons.