What does slop mean?

Slop is low-quality digital content produced in bulk, usually by AI. Merriam-Webster made it the 2025 Word of the Year and defines it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence”.

Thriving New, sharp and everywhere. Checked 7 Sept 2026 · 3 sources

  1. Thriving
  2. Alive
  3. Fading
  4. Endangered
  5. Extinct

How alive it is, from brand new to gone. Our editorial read, checked by hand.

THE ARTICLE HAS NO AUTHOR AND SEVEN PARAGRAPHS OF NOTHING
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Who made it

No author. The word is a reuse: developers and forum users picked up an old English word for mud and pig food and pointed it at machine-made content.

Where it came from

Tech forums and comment sections from 2023 onwards, then everywhere at once when the feeds filled up.

Who usually gets left out

The writers, illustrators and voice actors whose work was scraped to make the slop, and whose jobs it now competes with.

What slop means

Slop is not just “AI made this”. It is the volume and the carelessness: the point is quantity, and nobody checked. Merriam-Webster’s 2025 list of examples included absurd videos, off-kilter adverts, cheap propaganda, fake news that looks real, junky AI books, “workslop” reports that waste colleagues’ time, and an enormous number of talking cats.

It is a judgement, not a category. A person can make slop too. Calling something slop says it was made to fill a space, not to be good.

  1. 1One AI picture, quite funny
  2. 2Ten AI pictures, a bit much
  3. 3A hundred, all the same
  4. 4The whole feed is slop
How the joke builds, step by step.

Where it came from

The word is very old and has slid downhill for three centuries. It meant soft mud in the 1700s, food waste in the 1800s, and eventually rubbish or a thing of little value. Applying it to machine-made content in the 2020s is the newest step of the same insult.

It caught on because it names a feeling everyone already had. Not “this is false”, but “this is filler”.

When it was first seen

  • 1700s onwards: slop as mud, then food waste, then rubbish.
  • 2023–2024: “AI slop” spreads in tech and art circles as generated images and articles flood search results and feeds.
  • 15 December 2025: Merriam-Webster names “slop” its Word of the Year.

How it spread

The vector was recognition. Once you have a word for the thing, you see it in every search result, every recipe page and every autoplay video, and you say it out loud.

It also spread sideways into work: “workslop” is the same idea in a document nobody wanted, made quickly by a machine and read slowly by a person.

Variations

AI slop: the full phrase. Workslop: generated documents that make more work than they save. Sloppy: back to the ordinary adjective, now with an edge. Slopified: a place that used to have people in it.

Is it still in use?

Slop is new, sharp and everywhere, so it is nowhere near dying. The tell we watch for is the opposite of decline: it becoming so normal that it stops being an insult and turns into a category, the way “fast food” did.

Our read: thriving.

Similar words

Often mixed up: Slop vs brain rot · Slop vs that’s AI

That’s AIthe same suspicionMida verdict on qualityRage baitmade for the feed, not for you
Remix the Slop meme →All memesLook up another word

Questions people ask

What does slop mean in internet slang?

Low-quality digital content made in bulk, usually by AI. Merriam-Webster defines it as digital content of low quality produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.

Why is slop the 2025 Word of the Year?

Merriam-Webster announced it on 15 December 2025, pointing to the flood of cheap AI content: absurd videos, fake news that looks real, junk books and “workslop”.

Where does the word slop come from?

It meant soft mud in the 1700s, food waste in the 1800s, then rubbish or something of little value. Pointing it at AI content is the newest use of an old insult.

Is all AI content slop?

No. Slop describes content made carelessly and in quantity to fill space. Careful work made with AI is not what people mean by it.

Sources

  1. Merriam-Webster, Word of the Year 2025: slopmerriam-webster.com
  2. CNN Business, on Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the yearcnn.com
  3. Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, December 2025

Checked 7 Sept 2026. The “still in use” verdict is our editorial read, updated by hand, from the Ask page. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.

Cite this page

Phylum Digital. “What does slop mean?” https://phylumdigital.com/meme-slop.html. Checked 7 September 2026.

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