It’s difficult to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) without mentioning one of its obscure by-products – ‘slop’, which Merriam-Webster defines as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually by means of artificial intelligence”.
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have recently chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year, based on lookup data indicating spikes in the search frequency of the word.
The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, cringe propaganda, fake news that blurred the line between truth and fiction, and AI-generated media and artists. Think zombie football and cat soap operas.
“It’s such an illustrative word,” said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, in an interview with The Associated Press (AP) ahead of Monday’s announcement.
“It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous.”
Sora to blame?
Many critics have implicated OpenAI’s Sora, an AI video generator, in the flood of slop that has overtaken the internet this year.
Sora generates realistic videos from text prompts, offering easy-to-use tools for creating videos, which leads to large amounts of easily sharable content that is often misleading or very low quality.
According to the Wall Street Journal, critics are also concerned that these new tools could facilitate abuses of users’ likeness, despite built-in protections.
One of the first Sora-generated videos to go viral, for example, was a deepfake of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appearing to steal a graphics processing unit (an AI processor) from a hypermarket.
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A defiant word
To Barlow, however, ‘slop’ becoming Word of the Year brings a sense of hope.
The dictionary’s president stated that the spike in searches for the word reflects people’s increasing awareness of fake or low-quality content, and desire the opposite.
“They want things that are real, they want things that are genuine,” he said.
“It’s almost a defiant word when it comes to AI. When it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes AI actually doesn’t seem so intelligent.”
The original sense of the word ‘slop’ in the 1700s, according to Merriam-Webster, was ‘soft mud’.
In the 1800s it came to mean ‘food waste’ (as in ‘pig slop’), until more generally, ‘rubbish’ or ‘a product of little to no value.’
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KC Maderia 
Newsjustnews writers