When Merriam-Webster announced its Word of the Year was "slop," it made sense - at least from the perspective of someone who reports on the ins and outs of social media.

AI spam, fake videos, and junk content turned a centuries-old word into the perfect label for today’s internet. It’s official: 2025 was the year of slop.

SLOP—shorthand for synthetic, low-quality, overproduced content—has become the catchall for the flood of AI-generated media saturating our feeds. It’s easy to think of SLOP as just a volume problem; ...