A word that once named mud and pig feed now names almost any AI output in public, whether the work took seconds or days. Inside the year slop won the dictionary prizes, escaped its first careful definition, and became a charge that creators, workers, and platforms now have to answer.
In the summer of 2025 a grainy video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline spread across the feeds and fooled people who prided themselves on spotting a fake. MIT Technology Review later picked that clip as the moment slop broke into popular consciousness, and the reason was not the rabbits. It was the wave that followed, as the same trick returned with new animals, new objects, and no pause between copies.
That wave now has an official name, and the name does more than describe it. To call a thing slop is to say it should not have been made, should not have been sent, and should not have taken up a second of your attention. The word began this era as a precise complaint about unwanted output. It has ended up as a slur that can be aimed at a feed, a report, a song, a creator, or a colleague, and the aim is getting less careful by the month.
The Bigger Story
The dictionaries noticed first, or at least they noticed on the record. The Macquarie Dictionary in Australia chose AI slop as its Word of the Year for 2025, winning both the committee choice and the public vote, and defined it as low quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user. Merriam Webster followed in December 2025 and chose slop alone, defining it as digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.
The American Dialect Society completed the sweep in January 2026. At its vote on January 9 in New Orleans, the society selected slop as its Word of the Year for 2025, noting that the AI part no longer needed to be said out loud. A term that had been a nominee a year earlier could now stand on its own, and the society also praised it as a productive building block for new compounds, from slopification to friend slop.
Read those three verdicts together and the shift is plain. A definition that once needed three guards, low quality, in quantity, and not requested, has collapsed into a single gesture of contempt. The guards fell away in public use long before the dictionaries caught up. Once every feed carried talking cats, shrimp saints, fake news that looked real, and books nobody seemed to have read, the shortest available insult won.
Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you do not want to touch.
Merriam Webster was honest about the tone its own word carried. The publisher said slop set a tone that was less fearful and more mocking, a small message to AI that it did not look superintelligent when it tried to replace human creativity. Mockery is a healthier public mood than panic. It is also a mood that spreads fast, sticks to nearby targets, and rarely stops to check what it has hit.
Context
The word was built for disgust long before it was built for software. Merriam Webster traces the first sense, in the 1700s, to soft mud. In the 1800s it came to mean food waste, as in pig slop, and then rubbish in general, or a product of little or no value. A trough is the right ancestor for the modern sense, because trough food is mixed without care, served without choice, and eaten without trust in any single part of it.
The internet gave the word a second life before AI gave it a third. Writing in MIT Technology Review in December 2025, the magazine traced the current use of slop to the early 2010s on 4chan, where it served as a pejorative for cultural output that felt mass produced and lazy. When image and video models arrived, the old insult was waiting with the right texture, the right sound, and a ready made theory of blame.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1700s | Slop means soft mud in its first recorded sense |
| 1800s | The word comes to mean food waste fed to pigs, then rubbish in general |
| 2010s | Online forums use slop for cultural output that feels mass produced |
| 2024 | Simon Willison argues in May that slop is becoming the name for unwanted AI generated content |
| 2025 | Macquarie chooses AI slop and Merriam Webster chooses slop as words of the year |
| 2026 | The American Dialect Society chooses slop, and Spotify reports removing slop and spam from its recommendations at scale |
The man who did the most to fix the modern sense tried to keep it narrow. Simon Willison wrote in May 2024 that slop was becoming the term for unwanted AI generated content, and he drew the comparison with spam on purpose. Not all promotional content is spam, he argued, and not all AI generated content is slop, but content that is mindlessly generated and thrust on someone who did not ask for it earns the name. That test has two parts, and both matter. The work must be unrequested, and it must be unreviewed.
At work, the failure of that test now has its own compound and its own price tag. Researchers from BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab named the office version workslop in Harvard Business Review in September 2025, defining it as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to advance a task. A polished deck that forces a colleague to redo the thinking has not saved labour. It has moved the labour downhill and billed the person at the bottom.
Different Perspectives
The audience case for the word is strong, and it starts with a real flood. Nobody requested the endless remixes, the junk books, the fake clips built to farm a click, or the reports that waste a morning. A short, ugly word gives people a way to refuse the trough without writing an essay about platform incentives. On this view, slop is not cruelty. It is quality control performed by the crowd, in the only language the feed understands.
The platform case arrived later and carries more force than any insult. In an update on October 20, 2026, Spotify said it had taken more than 50 million tracks it classed as slop and spam out of its recommendations this year, separate from the more than 75 million spammy tracks it had already removed from the service and first reported in September 2025. When a platform uses the word as a sorting category, the slur stops being mere talk. It decides what gets heard, what gets paid, and what disappears without a hearing.
The creators who live under the label split into two camps, and both camps make a fair point. Some reclaim the word in public. Daryl Anselmo has posted an AI generated video every day since 2021 and gathered the work into a project titled AI Slop, shown in galleries including the Grand Palais Immersif in Paris, and he told MIT Technology Review that he works with the slop and has no shame about being deep into AI. Others use the label as a joke about surface glitches while insisting that the work underneath takes hours of trial, taste, and revision.
The second camp hears a dismissal where the first hears a dare. Eric Suerez and Adam Vaserstein, the creators behind the Granny Spills accounts, told the magazine they hate having their work called slop, because the term is used to dismiss AI generated content out of hand and it feels disrespectful of their creative input. Wenhui Lim, who makes the Niceaunties videos, said a single one minute video can take hours and sometimes days to make. Every AI video creator the magazine spoke to described receiving hateful messages simply for using the tools, with accusations of grifting and of taking work from artists who were already struggling.
That last charge has evidence behind the anger, even when the target is wrong. MIT Technology Review cited a Brookings study of one large freelance marketplace that found workers in occupations exposed to AI saw about a 2 percent decline in contracts and a 5 percent drop in earnings after the new generative tools launched in 2022. Adam Aleksic, an internet linguist quoted in the same account, described slop as a kind of derogatory slur for anything that feels like low quality mass production aimed at an unsuspecting public, and noted that people now slap it onto everything from salad bowls to meaningless work reports. A word that began by naming a product now lands on people, and people notice where it lands.
Why It Matters
A slur does different work from a criticism. A criticism names a flaw and can be answered, while a slur names a kind and expects the room to agree before the evidence arrives. When slop is used the second way, the question stops being whether a piece was checked, sourced, revised, or made with intent. The question becomes whether it belongs to a suspect class, and the cheapest proof of belonging is that a model touched it at any point in the making.
That shortcut harms the very judgment the word was meant to protect. Audiences trained to sniff for AI and stop thinking will miss plain human laziness, which produced mountains of junk long before any model could help. They will also miss careful work made with new tools, and they will reward work that hides its process better rather than work that was made better. A culture that polices origin instead of quality ends up with cleaner labels and dirtier feeds.
The workplace version shows where the shortcut leads at scale. The workslop research found that receiving polished but empty work did not only cost time. It cost trust, as colleagues who were sent such work rated the sender as less capable and less reliable. If slop becomes the default suspicion between workers, every draft sent in good faith arrives under a cloud, and every worker who uses a model at all must first prove that a person did the thinking. Suspicion, like slop itself, oozes into everything.
None of this argues for retiring the word. The flood it names is real, the trough is real, and some output deserves a name with mud in its family history. The argument is for keeping the word on its first leash, aimed at work that was pushed out unrequested and unreviewed, in quantity, with nobody willing to sign it. Used that way, slop is a standard. Used as a slur, it is a shrug dressed as a verdict.
Closing Reflection
Willison offered the internet a scalpel in 2024 and the internet, being the internet, turned it into a bucket. The scalpel still works if anyone cares to use it. Ask who asked for the piece, ask who checked it, ask who will stand behind it, and ask what it cost the person who received it. Work that fails those questions is slop, whatever made it, and work that passes them is not, whatever helped.
That is the distinction worth defending, because the next stage of this argument is already visible in the compounds. A language that can mint slopification and friend slop can mint a label for any group it wants to dismiss at volume, and each new label will feel as obvious and as funny as the last one did on first use. Words that carry disgust should be spent with care. Disgust is a powerful critic and a lazy editor, and it should never be allowed to do the reading for us.
Reporting draws on the Merriam Webster Word of the Year announcement for 2025, the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year result for 2025, the American Dialect Society Word of the Year vote of January 9, 2026, Simon Willison in May 2024, MIT Technology Review on AI slop and its creators in December 2025, BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab on workslop in Harvard Business Review in September 2025, and Spotify updates reported in September 2025 and October 2026, checked November 2026.
Sources
- Merriam Webster, Word of the Year 2025: Slop: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year
- American Dialect Society, 2025 Word of the Year Is Slop: https://americandialect.org/2025-word-of-the-year-is-slop/
- MIT Technology Review, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI Slop, December 2025: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/23/1130396/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-ai-slop/
- Niederhoffer and colleagues, AI Generated Workslop Is Destroying Productivity, Harvard Business Review, September 2025; Spotify slop and spam update, October 2026, reported by Music Business Worldwide
- Illustrations: Dirty Static
END OF TRANSMISSION
Stay curious. Question everything.
