We filled the internet with garbage, and now Slop is the word of the year — nice going, AI

If the internet is a sea of content, AI slop is the flotsam and jetsam we're forced to swim around to make it from shore to shore. The garbage content is so ubiquitous that Merriam-Webster chose "Slop" as its 2025 Word of the Year, describing it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

You know what they're talking about, right? We have at our fingertips a growing array of chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Sora, and untold others that, with a little more than a prompt, let us create reams of content, everything from photos and videos to articles, research documents, presentations, and even podcasts.

Some of it is, arguably, wonderful. AI's gift is its ability to find meaning in vast swaths of data. It can go deep, it can go wide ...