From Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science, December 24, 2025:
Since it’s dictionary week here on the blog, why not discuss Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: slop. They define it as:
digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.
Max Read discusses conventional associations with slop–qualities like “forgettability, predictability, unoriginality, lifelessness” or “cheap, low-effort, convenient, consumable, interchangeable,” He collects several more pointed definitions from the web:
“a low-to-zero marginal-cost substitute for something valued, or something being aggressively positioned to substitute for craft” from Bluesky
“the negative platonic form: not the ideal that particulars aspire toward, but the silhouette left when you subtract everything that would make a specific instance rather than a thing of a type” from Kevin Baker
He also proposes his own definition:
“slop” is that which is “fully optimized” to its domain to the point of texturelessness or characterlessness. “Slop” in this sense is anything designed to be as easy as possible to produce, sell, and consume, but it’s particularly slop at the point where all or most other players in the same space adopt the same strategies, and the material is no longer individual or differentiated from its competitors.
I enjoyed all of these. They paint slop as a kind of mass-produced shell rushing toward you at the speed of modern silicon chips.
But these definitions also all miss a defining feature of slop, the thing that makes me feel vaguely repulsed when I see it despite the superficial harmlessness of what is often just some generic message or image or text. Slop is not merely a genre of media, it is an attitude of production....
....MUCH MORE
Meanwhile at TechRadar, January 5 we hear from Microsoft's head honcho:
Satya Nadella wants us to stop calling AI "slop" - good luck with that
Recently:
Welcome To My World: The Age Of Slop
