"We've seen an absolute deluge of AI slop this year, from fake movie trailers on YouTube to AI-generated bands on Spotify. Not even food delivery like could escape the onslaught of AI-generated garbage that no one asked for. It's gotten to the point that half the videos my well-meaning parents send me on social media are AI-generated videos of dogs. This isn't all that surprising given how very intentionally the social media giants have added slop to all our feeds."
"Merriam-Webster rightly points out the somewhat mocking nature of calling it "slop." "Like slime, sludge and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don't want to touch. Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was 'soft mud.' In the 1800s it came to mean 'food waste' (as in 'pig slop'), and then more generally, 'rubbish' or 'a product of little or no value,'" the dictionary distributors wrote."
2025 saw AI slop — digital content of low quality produced in quantity by artificial intelligence — saturate online platforms. Examples include fake movie trailers on YouTube, AI-generated bands on Spotify, AI-driven food-delivery listings, and widespread AI dog videos on social media. Platforms implemented user options to reduce exposure and began combating specific instances, though AI-generated copycats still went unnoticed for weeks. Major video services incorporated AI-generated short videos. The term 'slop' carries historical senses of soft mud and food waste and was chosen as the 2025 word of the year.
Read at Engadget
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