Merriam-Webster Picks ‘Slop’ As the 2025 Word of the Year
Merriam-Webster officially unveiled the 2025 Word of the Year: Slop. The term isn’t about food or appearance. Slop refers to the rise of low-quality, mass-produced, and over-shared generative artificial intelligence content. We are talking about those cheese comic-looking images, poor rendering of people with extra limbs, and all of that. Honestly, after Pantone chose a white as the Color of 2026, this is a welcome acknowledgement of the world we live in right now.
The Word of the Year is Slop, according to Merriam-Webster
Slop is all about that low-budget AI content that has flooded our feeds this year. There has been a significant increase in the overuse of low-quality, poorly-made content using AI. Despite the bad content, it is being increasingly used by people across social media platforms.
Merriam-Webster defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” We have seen this from social media accounts ranging from newly exposed foreign bot farms to the president of the United States to your friends and family.
The rise of AI slop is more than just a drag on our society and social media. Brands utilizing AI this year for marketing have found themselves in an awkward place. Each time a brand has attempted to use AI to create new campaigns, it all feels hollow and fake. It isn’t long until social media users start pointing out distorted hands or shadows without bodies.
The year can be categorized by the list of think pieces and social media rants against AI. Comments like, “AI is ruining everything” are becoming increasingly common on social media posts utilizing the technology.
The exhaustive use of AI is a real downer for people
Before people leaned on AI, bad Photoshop images created exciting worlds of possibilities. We all knew that they were fake, and we all knew that they were ridiculous, but they brought us joy. A real person worked on that image and created something that was human. That will always resonate more with people.
Additionally, seeing fake videos and AI-generated images after fake videos and AI-generated images is just annoying. It’s honestly better to admit that you are unable to create a fun image and just rely on your words. Otherwise, the whole post is a real snooze fest.
Merriam-Webster proved that they have their finger on the pulse with this one. Slop is everywhere, and even if you didn’t know it by name, you know exactly what it is when someone puts “AI” in front of it. You can picture it in your mind as clearly as you can picture your favorite meal. The whole concept of this content is a reminder that just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
Art requires emotions and lived experience. Something that AI will never be able to replicate, no matter how much content it is fed. Human emotions are complex. No amount of technology will be able to perfectly match the human experience because it is, at the end, the human experience.
