Merriam-Webster names “slop” its word of the year

The impact of artificial intelligence on social media channels has not gone unnoticed by the most important American dictionaries. Amid the onslaught of content that has swept the Internet over the past 12 months, Merriam-Webster announced Sunday that its word for 2025 is “dirty.”

Dictionary Defines the term It is defined as “low-quality digital content that is typically mass-produced by artificial intelligence.”

“He loves The mud, Sludgeand clay, slope It has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. “Regression seeps into everything,” the dictionary writes, adding that in an age of anxiety about artificial intelligence, the term has become designed to convey a “less fearful, more cynical tone” of the technology.

“It’s a clarification,” Greg Barlow, president of Merriam-Webster, told The Associated Press. “It’s a piece of transformative technology, artificial intelligence, and it’s something that people have found fascinating and annoying and a little bit silly.”

The word “slop” has certainly been everywhere this year, as journalists and commentators sought to describe the ways platforms like… OpenAI Sora and Google Gemini I Spy They transform the Internet. Thanks to this new generation of media generators, there are now AI-generated books, podcasts, pop songs, TV commercials, and even entire movies. One study in May He claimed it Nearly 75 percent of all new web content from the previous month involved some type of artificial intelligence.

These new tools have led to what is called the “slow economy,” in which large amounts of content generated by artificial intelligence are made available. They can be milked for advertising money. Critics Worry about it This trend is further polarizing digital communities, dividing them into those who can afford high-quality paywalled content, and those who can only afford a sordid digital diet, which – as you might imagine – can be very light on informational value.

But the word “slop” has also been used to describe the impact of artificial intelligence on a wide variety of areas unrelated to traditional media consumption, including Cybersecurity reports, Legal briefingsand College essayamong other things. Its influence is broad, to say the least.

Related, were the technical words Big winners in the WOTY (Word of the Year) category. this year. The Macquarie Dictionary beat out Merriam-Webster to make “AI slop” its annual term, while the Oxford Dictionary chose “Ragebait.” Collins Dictionary went by “encoding atmospheres.”