https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year
"Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen
slop as the 2025 Word of the
Year. We define
slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced
usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped
on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came
through again.
The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising
images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written
books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats.
People found it annoying, and people ate it up.
“AI Slop is Everywhere,” warned
The Wall Street Journal, while admitting to
enjoying some of those cats. “AI Slop Has Turned Social Media Into an
Antisocial Wasteland,” reported
CNET.
Like
slime,
sludge, and
muck,
slop has the wet sound of something
you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the
word, in the 1700s, was “soft mud.” In the 1800s it came to mean “food waste”
(as in “pig slop”), and then more generally, “rubbish” or “a product of little
or no value.”
In 2025, amid all the talk about AI threats,
slop set a tone that’s less
fearful, more mocking. The word sends a little message to AI: when it comes to
replacing human creativity, sometimes you don’t seem too superintelligent."
Via Christoph S.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
