Merriam-Webster’s word of the year delivers a dismissive verdict on junk AI content (arstechnica.com)

Merriam-Webster has named "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year, a term that has emerged as a descriptor for the deluge of low-quality AI-generated content flooding the internet. This choice highlights a growing cultural awareness of the prevalence of shoddy digital material, particularly in the wake of advancements in generative AI models. Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow noted that "slop" encapsulates users' mixed feelings about the current AI landscape, which can be fascinating yet frustrating and absurd at times. The selection of "slop" underscores a significant trend in the AI/ML community, as it signals the wider implications of AI's impact on content creation and digital communication. As users increasingly seek to navigate an online environment rife with misleading or inferior material, terms like "slop" reflect both a linguistic evolution and the pressing need for quality standards in AI-generated content. This trend aligns with other recent word selections by dictionaries that aim to capture societal shifts, including Cambridge's choice of "hallucinate" for its 2023 term, revealing ongoing concerns about the reliability of AI outputs amidst a rapidly changing digital landscape.