Towards a definition of slop

"Slop" was Merriam-Webster's 2025 word of the year. They define slop as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

This isn't bad, but it's imprecise. A tweet that reads, "Our ace team of researchers delved a new field. What they discovered wasn't a finding—it was a gamechanger" could be called slop, even though it is quite short. MW's definition says "usually in quantity," which leaves room for slop that's simply "digital content of low quality."

But not all low-quality digital content is slop. My Garageband mashup of Kesha and John Coltrane on Soundcloud isn't slop, it's just garbage.

"Slop" connotes use of AI in a way that compromises the quality of the work. Not all digital content produced by AI is slop. Software documentation, for example, is often better when AI-generated. Connor O'Malley's videos heavily use AI, but don't qualify as slop.

"Slop" exists along a two-dimensional axis of creator use of AI and consumer expectations of effort. A work is slop to the degree that a creator uses AI more than consumers expect them to. See chart:

Use of AI is generally ok for work with little expressive value, like software code and corporate documents. But people generally expect that works of art reflect a human's lived experience and emerged from a human artistic process. This is how things are today. How they'll be next year is anyone's guess.