The timing feels significant. "Slop" emerged as shorthand for AI-generated garbage, but it's already being stretched to cover any output someone doesn't like. I've seen it applied to legitimate content that just happened to be formatted cleanly or use common phrasing.
The interesting thing is slop predates AI - there was always plenty of low-effort human-generated content farming for clicks or SEO. The word just gave us a convenient label for something we couldn't quite articulate before.
What changes is volume. When producing mediocre content costs almost nothing, the noise floor rises for everyone. The word of the year isn't really about AI - it's about our collective anxiety over signal-to-noise ratios.
I actually think in practice the meaning has always been "things I dislike". Before AI you could see it applied to all kinds of things in media, WWE is slop, Soap Operas are slop, Genre Fiction is slop. It's almost exclusively a pejorative based on taste, intended to throw scorn on what other people enjoy. When a person uses it I stop listening, because essentially the speaker has stopped saying anything of value.
I watched that show on netflix where the professional song writers would write potential hit songs.. that was the closest thing to human slop I've seen
I've noticed amoung colleagues who are not fond of ai usage they love to call out "slop". If a line of code is too verbose or too succinct it must be ai. If a routine doesn't use the function they created when it's something tangentially related it must be ai slop. It's like the new form of gatekeeping.
The timing feels significant. "Slop" emerged as shorthand for AI-generated garbage, but it's already being stretched to cover any output someone doesn't like. I've seen it applied to legitimate content that just happened to be formatted cleanly or use common phrasing.
The interesting thing is slop predates AI - there was always plenty of low-effort human-generated content farming for clicks or SEO. The word just gave us a convenient label for something we couldn't quite articulate before.
What changes is volume. When producing mediocre content costs almost nothing, the noise floor rises for everyone. The word of the year isn't really about AI - it's about our collective anxiety over signal-to-noise ratios.
I actually think in practice the meaning has always been "things I dislike". Before AI you could see it applied to all kinds of things in media, WWE is slop, Soap Operas are slop, Genre Fiction is slop. It's almost exclusively a pejorative based on taste, intended to throw scorn on what other people enjoy. When a person uses it I stop listening, because essentially the speaker has stopped saying anything of value.
This one is an apt pick. I only worry it’s early and the true wave of slop is not yet upon us.
we badly need AI-free spaces
I'd like to see an examination of how the phrase 'human slop' rose and fell in this year. Initially emerging as a counterpoint, it's now receded.
I watched that show on netflix where the professional song writers would write potential hit songs.. that was the closest thing to human slop I've seen
Some other WOTY selections:
Oxford 'rage bait' https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...
Collins 'vibe coding' https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/collins-w...
Cambridge 'parasocial' https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2025/11/18/cambridge-di...
Dictionary.com '67' https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-year-2025/
Do any websites collect lists of WOTY by year?
hm, suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_the_year
So anybody making a site for it now would be struck down by Google Panda. It's a shame there's no niche to support a middle ground.
I've noticed amoung colleagues who are not fond of ai usage they love to call out "slop". If a line of code is too verbose or too succinct it must be ai. If a routine doesn't use the function they created when it's something tangentially related it must be ai slop. It's like the new form of gatekeeping.