Washington: Creepy, zany and demonstrably fake content is often called “slop”. The word’s proliferation online, in part thanks to the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence, landed it Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year.
“It’s such an illustrative word,” said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press 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.”
“Slop” was first used in the 1700s to mean soft mud, but it evolved more generally to mean something of little value. The definition has since expanded to mean “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence”.
In other words, “you know, absurd videos, weird advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks real, junky AI-written digital books,” Barlow said.
AI video generators like Sora have wowed with their ability to quickly create realistic clips based merely on text prompts. But a flood of these images on social media, including clips depicting celebrities and deceased public figures, has raised worries about misinformation, deepfakes and copyright.
Such content has existed online for years, but the tools are more accessible now, and used to political ends by, among other figures, the head of the Pentagon. Last month, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a manipulated image of a beloved cartoon turtle, reimagined as a grenade-wielding fighter, to defend US military actions in Venezuela.
The Canadian animated show “Franklin” teaches preschoolers about kindness, empathy and inclusivity, but in Hegseth’s hands, its 6-year-old main character became a tool to promote violence.
The word “slop” evokes unpleasant images of mud-caked pigs crowding around a dirty trough, or perhaps a bucket of steaming, fetid stew. Or AI amalgamations of algorithmic biases laden with offensive or nonsensical imagery.
For some, the word induces dread.
But to Barlow, it brings a sense of hope. The dictionary’s president says the spike in searches for the word reflects that people have grown more aware of fake or shoddy content, and desire the inverse.
“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.”
To select the word of the year, the dictionary’s editors review data about which words have risen in search results and usage. Then they come to a consensus about which word best reflects the span of the year.
“We like to think that we are a mirror for people,” Barlow said.
Over the years, some words are consistently looked up, but they’re filtered out as the dictionary’s editors pick the one that best defines the year at hand.
“Words like ubiquitous,’ paradigm,’ albeit,’ irregardless,’ these are always top lookups because they’re words that are on the edge of our lexicon,” Barlow said. “’Irregardless’ is a word in the dictionary for one reason: It’s used. It’s been used for decades to mean regardless.”
The dictionary has selected one word every year since 2003 to capture and make sense of the current moment. Last year, shortly after the US presidential election and amid the shifting national mood, Merriam-Webster chose the word “polarisation”.
A fresh edition came out last month that adds over 5,000 new words, a rare step that involves fully revising and reimagining one of its most popular dictionaries.
AP
