My head feels like it’s been stuffed with insulation foam and kicked down a flight of concrete stairs. The sun is doing that thing where it glares through the blinds with judgemental intensity, demanding I acknowledge the day. I’m not ready for the day. I’m barely ready for the coffee I just spiked with a generous pour of something brown and cheap that I found on the bottom shelf.
I opened the laptop to check the wires, see what fresh hell the digital overlords have cooked up for us while I was sleeping off the previous night’s bad decisions. Usually, it’s the standard fare: a billionaire building a bunker, a new phone that does exactly what the old phone did but costs a kidney, or some startup promising to digitize the human soul for a monthly subscription fee.
But today, staring back at me through the haze of cigarette smoke and regret, is a headline that actually makes sense. It’s rare, like finding a pristine twenty-dollar bill in a gutter full of sludge. The Macquarie Dictionary—the folks who decide what noises coming out of our mouths are officially “language”—has announced their Word of the Year for 2025.
And the winner is: AI slop.
I almost choked on my drink. It’s perfect. It’s beautiful in its ugliness. It’s the most honest thing to come out of the tech world in a decade, and the tech world didn’t even come up with it. We did. The tired, heavy-lidded masses staring at screens, realizing that the ocean of information we were promised has turned into a backed-up sewer.
“Slop.” Just say it out loud. It feels gross in your mouth. It lands with a wet thud. It sounds like ladlefuls of gray gruel being slapped onto a metal tray in a prison cafeteria. And that, my friends, is exactly what the internet has become.
According to the committee of word-nerds over at Macquarie, “AI slop” refers to “AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use.” They beat out some stiff competition, but nothing captures the zeitgeist quite like the realization that we are being force-fed digital filler. We used to have spam, which was annoying but honest in its dishonesty. You knew the Nigerian Prince wasn’t real. You knew the pills wouldn’t make you a stallion. It was a con, but it was a human con.
Slop is different. Slop is the uncanny valley turned into text and image. It’s those articles that read like they were written by a robot having a stroke. It’s those images of women with seven fingers and three rows of teeth smiling at a sunset that dissolves into a nuclear blast. It’s content generated by machines, for machines, to game algorithms run by machines, while we humans stand around like idiots trying to find a recipe for chicken soup that isn’t buried under four thousand words of hallucinated backstory about a grandmother who never existed.
The dictionary committee said something that stuck with me, right between the ribs. They noted that while we used to be “search engineers” trying to find facts, we now have to be “prompt engineers” just to wade through the filth. We are essentially garbage men in reverse. We aren’t taking the trash out; we’re digging through the landfill trying to find a single apple core that hasn’t rotted yet.
And the kicker is, the term had to fight for the title. It wasn’t a walkover. Let’s look at the losers, shall we? Because nothing tells you about the state of humanity quite like the words that almost defined us but failed.
First up, we had “Ozempic face.”
God, that’s bleak. We live in a world where people are injecting diabetes medication to dissolve their vanity handles, only to end up looking like gaunt, haunted versions of themselves, and we needed a specific term for the resulting skeletal visage. I’ve got a face that looks like a roadmap of bad choices and cheap whiskey, but at least I earned it the old-fashioned way: slowly, painfully, and with a lot of late nights in dive bars. “Ozempic face” is just the rich buying their way out of gluttony and landing straight in purgatory. I’m glad it lost. It’s too depressing, even for me.
Then there was “blind box.” A mystery box containing an unseen collectible. This is just gambling for people who are afraid of casinos. You pay money to get a piece of plastic junk, but the thrill is you don’t know which piece of plastic junk it is until you open it. It’s a metaphor for modern dating, really. You swipe, you match, you meet for a drink, and then you realize the box contains a narcissist with a podcast.
They also listed “ate (and left no crumbs).” Apparently, this means someone did something perfectly. I don’t know. I’m too old and too pickled to keep up with slang that sounds like a review of a sandwich. If I eat and leave no crumbs, it means I was starving, not that I was successful.
And finally, “Roman Empire.” A term for things men think about frequently. I think about the fall of Rome a lot, sure. Mostly the part where the lead pipes made everyone crazy and the debauchery got so bad the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own excess. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But frankly, if you’re thinking about Centurions more than you’re thinking about how to pay your rent or why your liver hurts, you’ve got too much free time.
But “AI slop” took the crown. And rightly so.
The committee mentioned some honorable mentions that deserve a pour of their own. “Clankers.” A slur for AI robots doing human jobs. It sounds like something a space racist would shout in a Star Wars movie. “We don’t serve clankers here!” It’s charming that we’re already developing derogatory slang for our future overlords. Maybe if we insult them enough, they’ll get depressed and shut themselves down before they launch the nukes. One can hope.
Then there’s “medical misogyny” and the “attention economy.” Heavy hitters. The attention economy is particularly rich. We are the product, sold by the second, our eyeballs glued to screens watching 15-second videos of people dancing or cooking or screaming, while the algorithms harvest our dopamine like farmers milking cows. We are paying with our lives, one scroll at a time, and in return, we get… slop.
It’s a cycle. The attention economy demands content. The humans can’t make it fast enough. The machines step in to vomit out millions of blog posts, videos, and images. The slop fills the trough. We eat the slop. We get sick. We ask for more.
Donald Trump, the article notes, has been dubbed the “emperor” of slop. No surprise there. Politics has always been about manufacturing a reality that doesn’t exist, but now they have the tools to render it in 4K. “Slopaganda.” That’s a word from the article, coined by David Astle. Slopaganda. It flows off the tongue like expired milk. It’s beautiful. It’s the fusion of lies and incompetence. It’s not just that they’re lying to us; it’s that they’re using a predictive text generator to do it. They don’t even respect us enough to hand-craft the deception anymore.
But here is the part that made me laugh so hard I dropped ash on my keyboard.
Guardian Australia—god bless their earnest little hearts—decided to ask ChatGPT how it felt about “AI slop” being the Word of the Year.
Now, imagine asking a serial killer how he feels about the rising murder rate, and him telling you that it’s actually a good thing because it raises awareness about neighborhood safety.
The bot, in its infinite, soulless wisdom, said: “The fact that AI slop won Word of the Year tells me that people are becoming more discerning about the quality of AI-generated content. That’s good for everyone - including the development of better AI - because it creates pressure for transparency, accuracy, and substance rather than volume.”
I need another drink.
“Good for everyone.” “Pressure for transparency.” Listen to that corporate-speak. It’s programmed to sound like a PR manager trying to spin a chemical spill as a spontaneous rapid terraforming event. The machine is generating slop to explain why calling it slop is actually a constructive critique of its artistic process.
It didn’t stop there. The bot added: “I exist to avoid producing exactly what the term refers to – so seeing it elevated to a cultural milestone is a bit like being reminded of the standard I need to live up to every time I answer a prompt.”
The audacity. The sheer, unmitigated gall of the algorithm. It exists to generate plausible-sounding text based on statistical probabilities. It doesn’t know what truth is. It doesn’t know what “quality” is. It’s a parrot that read the entire internet and is now repeating it back to us in a slightly different order, acting offended that we noticed it’s just squawking.
It claims it exists to avoid producing slop. That’s like a whiskey bottle claiming it exists to promote sobriety. The machine is the slop factory. It’s the nozzle. And it’s looking us dead in the eye (figuratively, since it has no eyes, only data points) and telling us that it’s essentially an artisan trying to elevate the craft.
This is where we are in 2025. We have words for the garbage filling our screens. we have slurs for the robots taking our jobs, and we have the robots themselves lecturing us on the importance of high standards.
The Australian Electoral Commission is worried about deepfakes. They should be. We’ve reached a point where you can’t trust your eyes, your ears, or the text on the screen. You can’t even trust that the person arguing with you on Twitter is a person. It’s probably a “clanker” running a “slopaganda” script funded by a “blind box” economy.
And us? What are we?
The committee asked if the people ingesting and regurgitating this content are soon to be called “AI sloppers.”
Yeah. That’s us. The sloppers. We sit at the table, bibs on, spoons ready, waiting for the next ladle of content. “Feed us!” we cry. “Give us the listicle! Give us the deepfake! Give us the answer to the question we didn’t ask!” And the great digital spigot opens up and drowns us in mediocrity.
I look at the empty glass on my desk. The amber liquid is gone, leaving just a sticky ring on the wood. That’s real. The headache throbbing behind my eyes? That’s real. The rent notice in the physical mailbox downstairs? That’s unfortunately very real.
Everything else is just noise. It’s just ones and zeros dancing in a pattern designed to sell ad space. It’s slop
Source: Macquarie Dictionary announces ‘AI slop’ as its word of the year, beating out Ozempic face