"Slop" is Chosen as Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year
"All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters."
Merriam-Webster chose "Slop" as the word of the year. Defining the word as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." This year, the slop was in videos, advertising images, video game trailers, and even AI-generated books.
According to Merriam-Webster, the original sense of the word in the 1700s was "soft mud." In the 1800s meant "food waste", and then its meaning was more like "rubbish". Now, in 2025, the word is used to mock the use of AI.
To name some cases of slop we've encountered throughout the year, the first example that comes to mind is ARK: Survival Evolved's AI-generated trailer, shared during the Game Developers Conference, only to get deleted shortly after due to the community's backlash.
Another case that we saw was when Coca-Cola dropped a Christmas ad made with AI. Last year, they did the same, they were criticized, and sadly, they thought that this year would be different. It wasn't.
The most recent example, however, was brought to us by McDonald's Netherlands, which shared an AI-generated commercial describing Christmas as "the most terrible time of the year."
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