AI slop is here, it's ubiquitous, and now, it's the word of the year.
The Macquarie Dictionary dubbed the term the epitome of 2025 linguistics, with a committee of word experts saying the outcome embodies the word of the year's general theme of reflecting "a major aspect of society or societal change throughout the year".
"We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop – AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use," the committee said in a statement announcing its decision.
"While in recent years we've learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop.Slop in this sense will be a robust addition to English for years to come.
"The question is, are the people ingesting and regurgitating this content soon to be called AI sloppers?"
The term was up against a shortlist of other cultural moments and terminology, including: Ozempic face (a condition resulting from the use of a semaglutide drug); blind box (a type of mystery box containing an unseen collectible); ate (and left no crumbs) (an expression used to indicate that someone has performed or executed something perfectly; and Roman Empire (a term for various events, interests or subjects, that one finds themselves frequently thinking about).
The committee was made up of the editorial team at Macquarie Dictionary as well as the ABC language research specialist Tiger Webb and cryptic crossword legend David Astle, better known as DA.
Astle wrote that AI slop was this decade's equivalent of spam in a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald.
"AI slop, to be precise, the clear victor of the Internet category," he wrote."Handily the barb can be packed into fusions, such as slopaganda, slop music and corpslop, to name three.
"Though come the crunch, the robots won twice over.Not just their clanker slur, but the scrumptious slop they serve on demand.Alphabet soup du jour with a splash of unknown sources."
