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.
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“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 (December 15, 2025) announcement. “It's part of a transformative technology, Artificial Intelligence (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 AI."
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