The Economist, with its usual understated British charm, has named “slop” the word of the year. And for once, the British got the mood right.Slop. It’s not a tech term. It’s not a buzzword from a TED Talk. It’s what pigs eat. Or used to, until the pigs got an upgrade and the humans got downgraded. In 2025, slop isn’t just what’s in the trough — it’s what’s on your feed, your inbox, your search results, your brain. It’s the word we didn’t know we needed to describe what the digital world has become: a lukewarm stew of AI-generated mush served up by machines that never sleep and people who’ve stopped caring.OpenAI’s Sora lets anyone create “joyfully fake” videos in seconds. LinkedIn is full of AI-crafted guru wisdom like “Sometimes leadership means following your own silence.” And Google search results have been reduced to auto-generated slop shops that think turmeric can cure heartbreak. Ask a health question and you’ll get a 600-word hallucination wearing a lab coat.The internet is drowning in content that looks like content but feels like chewing cardboard — tasteless, textureless, and suspiciously repetitive. Welcome to the slopocalypse.
Why Slop Is the Perfect Word for Right Now
There’s something beautifully honest about the word slop. It doesn’t try to impress you. It doesn’t care if it offends. It just is. Slop is messy. Slop is thoughtless. Slop is scalable.And slop is exactly what generative AI was built to do.Chatbots, video models, voice tools — all designed to generate endless amounts of “stuff.” It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to exist. It just has to fill space: a caption, a reel, a newsletter, a pitch deck. That’s the genius of slop — it masquerades as information, as insight, as value. But it’s just there to keep the machine running.Worse, slop feeds itself. AI models are now training on AI outputs. Machine learning is eating its own leftovers, like a snake snacking on yesterday’s regurgitated tail. The result? A growing universe of statistically sound garbage. And because we’ve taught the algorithm that engagement matters more than truth, more than depth, more than originality, what we get is… more slop.The cultural moment fits, too. We’ve optimized ourselves into stupidity. We want things fast, frictionless, formatted. We don’t want to read — we want summaries. We don’t want art — we want “content.” The idea of slop being not just an accident but a feature of the current internet feels like the most honest self-own of the decade.And so we scroll through endless videos narrated by emotionless AI voices, stitched together from fake footage, optimized for maximum nothingness. We repost AI-written threads that say “this blew my mind” before summarizing the Wikipedia entry for string theory. We nod along to slop and pretend it’s insight.
AI Promised Us Productivity. It Gave Us Spam.
But here’s where the joke curdles. For all the hype about how AI would make us more efficient, more productive, more everything — it’s mostly made us more tired.Remember when generative AI was supposed to write our emails, crunch our numbers, and free us up to do “higher-value work”? That dream didn’t even survive the onboarding process. What we got instead was ChatGPT drafting your memo in 20 seconds — and you spending two hours editing out the weird tone, fixing the logic, and wondering if it just made up the numbers.Generative AI is brilliant at producing first drafts. It is terrible at understanding context. It has no memory, no judgment, no taste. It can mimic grammar and style and tone, but it has the same relationship to good writing that instant noodles have to real food — edible, but only in emergencies, and definitely not nourishing.Corporate AI deployments are faring no better. Despite hundreds of millions poured into “AI transformation,” 95% of these projects have delivered zero financial return. Zero. That’s not disruption — that’s a PowerPoint hallucination.The problem is painfully simple: AI is easy to demo and hard to deploy. It impresses in beta. It breaks in reality. Most industries don’t run on theory — they run on nuance, adaptation, judgment. Retail, construction, education, healthcare — all filled with edge cases, human variables, unstructured chaos. Chatbots don’t thrive in chaos. Humans do.And let’s be honest — even in white-collar offices, people don’t want AI doing their jobs. They want it doing the boring parts so they can slack off in peace. Instead, AI has made the boring parts more confusing, the fun parts more synthetic, and the outcomes more questionable. It hasn’t saved time. It’s redistributed the mess.
Slop Isn’t a Bug. It’s the Business Model.
The irony is that this isn’t a glitch. Slop is working as intended. It’s not the byproduct of bad AI — it’s the product.Platforms want engagement, not accuracy. Publishers want volume, not quality. Creators want reach, not substance. And AI is the perfect tool for that. It can produce ten mediocre pieces for the cost of one good one. And ten mediocre pieces will always win the algorithm.The result is the end of coherence. Newsfeeds full of copy-pasted AI summaries. YouTube channels run by bots reading Wikipedia. Instagram reels made of AI-generated faces selling AI-generated life advice. Entire slop-factories running 24/7 on machine labor and human indifference.We now live in a world where content is so cheap, even the bots are getting bored.
Is There a Way Out? Maybe — But It’s Slow.
There is, perhaps, a silver lining. Some research suggests people are getting better at spotting slop — and rejecting it. When users are shown AI-generated images or text, many become more likely to pay for verified, human-created content. Credibility, in the slop era, might actually become cool again.But the escape won’t be instant. There’s no magical filter that separates real from fake, useful from generic. We’ll have to build new habits, better tools, and maybe — just maybe — value quality again.Until then, slop is here to stay. It’s in our feeds, our inboxes, our workflows, our habits. The future isn’t fully artificial. It’s just artificially average — fast, cheap, and empty.Slop is the word of the year. Because it’s also the product, the business model, the culture.
