The latest dictionary to announce its Word of the Year for 2025 is our own Macquarie Dictionary.
This year their top choice is— ‘AI slop.’
The dictionary says this is a colloquial noun meaning ‘low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user.’
In other words, you ask one of the AI websites to generate something for you, and what comes out is a load of rubbish.
That’s ‘AI slop’!
The judging committee added this:
‘‘We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use. 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?’
A good question.
And what else was on their short list?
Well, among the trendy words they considered, but which missed out on the gong, were: ‘clanker’ (an artificial intelligence-driven robot which completes tasks that are normally performed by a human—popularised by a Star Wars cartoon series); ‘medical misogyny’ (entrenched prejudice against females in the context of medical treatment and knowledge, especially in the area of reproductive health—but does this really happen? In this day and age?); and ‘attention economy’ (an economy in which human attention is treated as a major commodity, especially in advertising—which probably explains those weird ads that are designed to make us sit up and pay attention).
The People’s Choice Award (the one we are allowed to vote on) also went to ‘AI slop’ (so clearly this is bothering a lot of people).
The Urban Dictionary says: ‘AI slop” means ‘Any form of digital media (videos, images, etc.) made mostly or exclusively with generative artificial intelligence, with inaccurate, misleading, eye-catching, or otherwise silly content made to make a reader/viewer engage with it, usually to get clout (likes/favourites/whatever) and/or make money off of it if possible.’
The earliest citation they have for ‘AI slop’ is from January this year—so this is still a new expression.
Tonight, I will join Peta Credlin for 'Words Matter' on Sky News.
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