Here's the most telling fact about 2025: America's oldest dictionary publisher chose to weaponize the English language against AI-generated content.
Merriam-Webster didn't mince words when they crowned "slop" as their 2025 Word of the Year. Their definition? "Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."
Ouch. That's not just linguistic observation—that's a declaration of war.
From "Authentic" to "Slop" in Two Years
The trajectory is brutal when you connect the dots. In 2023, Merriam-Webster picked "authentic" as their word, driven by AI debates about what's real versus performative. Now we've escalated to outright calling AI output slop.
That progression tells the whole story. We went from philosophical hand-wringing about authenticity to straight-up disgust at the quality flooding our feeds.
<> The 2025 choice builds on this trend, escalating from 2023's AI-related authenticity debates to direct critique of low-quality AI output./>
The dictionary's choice reflects massive lookup spikes for "slop" as people searched for a term to describe "all that stuff" dominating digital spaces. When a 194-year-old institution starts throwing shade at your industry, maybe it's time to listen.
What Nobody Is Talking About
Everyone's focusing on the burn, but the real story is in the business implications. Google's March 2024 updates already started demoting low-quality AI content, and now we have linguistic legitimacy for the crackdown.
This isn't just about hurt feelings. It's about:
- Advertisers pulling budget from "sloppy" ecosystems
- SEO penalties getting more aggressive
- Platform liability for hosting obvious AI filler
- Market segmentation into "verified human" vs AI content by 2026
The AI vendor pressure is real. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might need to invest heavily in premium tiers for high-quality output, while their free tools keep amplifying the slop problem.
The Developer Reckoning
For those of us building with AI, this linguistic middle finger should be a wake-up call. The dictionary didn't single out specific providers, but the message is clear: quality matters more than quantity.
We need:
- Enhanced filtering systems that can distinguish genuine utility from bulk output
- Provenance tracking using standards like C2PA to label AI content transparently
- Model fine-tuning focused on coherence and originality, not just speed
The irony is delicious. We built tools to scale content creation, and now the linguistic establishment is scaling their contempt right back at us.
The Authenticity Trap
Remember when "authentic" was performative? Now "slop" is becoming the default assumption for AI content. That's a massive trust erosion that goes beyond technical problems into cultural rejection.
The EU AI Act's high-risk labeling takes effect in 2026, and suddenly regulatory pressure has linguistic backing. When dictionaries start codifying your industry's quality crisis, regulatory capture isn't far behind.
Merriam-Webster's annual tradition since 2003 has always captured cultural zeitgeist through lookup data. But "slop" feels different—more judgment than observation.
The linguistic establishment just told the AI industry to do better. The question is whether we'll listen, or keep flooding the internet with content so bad it needs its own dictionary entry.
