Sometimes, the Merriam-Webster word of the year is revealed. And 2025 was one of those years.
Most obviously, the famous and famous publisher of dictionaries and other things used to “slop” their Word in the year 2025. According to Merriam-Webster, you are most likely to have used the Internet in the past calendar year.
The Internet saw an explosion of slop in the year 2025. A slop volcano, if you will. On social media apps, music streaming services, video platforms, group chats, the White House X feed, and our boxes, Ai Slop feels inevitable.
It may have been an easy choice for merriam-webster, but that doesn’t make it wrong. This year, AI-anense’s emptiness and depth were extended to the Internet like never before. Short video feeds are now filled with cute but questionable original videos, and Facebook is overflowing with unlimited AI images cut by “nobody likes me” signs. That last part is true, I saw a a ton of it.
So, why is 2025 a slop year?
Big Tech organizations have worked hard to make sure that the Internet is filled with as much AI content as possible. For the first time, AI video models such as veo 3 and Opelai’s Opelai 2 have made it possible to create virtually realistic videos. While a trained eye can often spot an AI-generated video, it’s hard to tell if the viral videos are real.
Bright light speed
Meta even released its own short video program directly Watching clips produced by AI, and it wasn’t the only major technology company that released an unlimited slop machine in 2025. Where AI companies have been around for a few years now, companies like that need it to be part of their business strategies.
Heck, people are even talking about putting anti-deepening clauses in their places now. In 2025, Ayi went from curiosity to nurturing curiosity, and “slop” reflected that trend.
This had serious consequences for the Internet verdacular, in that “slop” became shorthand for anything familiar and discarded, regardless of whether AI was involved or not. In the world of video games, for example, “Friends” became the name of cooperative multiplayer games in 2025. For others, the term applies to recent releases from the low-impact universe and special movies. It becomes more like “content for content’s sake,” as it were.
Our digital culture and tech journalists can’t keep up with the slop machine this year. From emotional support kangaroos and bunnies jumping on trampolines to deep sex and disturbing political memes, slop is everywhere you look. We even did some beatings.
Slop can be harmless fluff, or it can have a dark side, but it fills the Internet trail like never before.
So, it can’t be denied – 2025 was a slop year, at least according to the record dictionary. I really don’t know how wrong it is.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAi, alleging that Ziff Davis CopyRights to the training and operation of its AI programs.
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