AI slop
Content made with generative AI cheaply and in bulk, with little care for quality or accuracy, and put before people who did not ask for it.
- A Facebook image of Jesus fused with prawns
- A travel guide listing a food bank among sights not to miss
- Thousands of near-identical tracks mass-uploaded to a streaming service
- A chatbot-written bug report sent to an open-source project
- Current meaning
- 2024
- Simon Willison adopts slop for unwanted AI content, as spam is for email.
- Also called
- Slop
- The short form, and Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year.
In plain words
AI slop is low-quality content churned out with generative AI, such as junk images, videos, music and reports that nobody asked for.
Merriam-Webster’s definition stresses low quality and large quantities.1 Using generative AI does not by itself make something slop. Simon Willison, a programmer and blogger, compares the word with spam: much promotion is legitimate, and so is much AI-generated content.2
Slop turns up wherever publishing is cheap and attention pays. Facebook feeds have filled with surreal AI images. Spotify says it removed more than 75 million spammy tracks in a year as generative tools spread.3 In July 2025 the curl open-source project said about a fifth of that year’s security reports had been AI slop. Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review call the office version workslop: AI output that looks polished but lacks substance.
Platforms have started to act. YouTube, Spotify and LinkedIn have each changed their rules or tools to curb it.
The term topped several word-of-the-year lists for 2025. Macquarie Dictionary named AI slop its Word of the Year. Merriam-Webster, The Economist and the American Dialect Society chose slop.4
Slop is often confused with hallucination, a false statement that a model presents as fact. Slop often contains errors, but accurate text can still be slop if nobody checked it or wanted it. A deepfake is made to pass as real, usually to deceive. Slop is made cheaply, for volume.
How it works
Slop begins with cheap generation. A person or a script prompts a large language model or an image, video or music generator. The output is published with little or no review. Spotify says AI tools let anyone produce music in bulk, which makes spam tactics such as mass uploads and duplicates easier.3
The money comes from attention. 404 Media reported that Facebook’s own payouts fund strange AI posts by creators in India, Vietnam and the Philippines. They learn the methods from YouTube influencers and paid Telegram guides.5 On music services the prize is royalties. At Deezer, AI-generated tracks passed half of new uploads in June 2026 but drew only 1% to 3% of streams. Up to 85% of those streams in 2025 were fraudulent.6
Platforms respond by cutting off pay or reach. In July 2025 YouTube updated its monetization policies to better identify mass-produced and repetitious content. Spotify added a music spam filter.3 In 2026 LinkedIn added a button for reporting posts that seem like AI slop.
Spotting slop is itself a judgment. Chantal Shaib and colleagues built a taxonomy from interviews with experts. They found that yes-or-no slop judgments are partly subjective but track qualities such as coherence and relevance.
Origin and first known use
Slop first meant a mudhole or puddle, around 1400, and semi-liquid food by the 1650s, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Merriam-Webster dates soft mud to the 1700s instead, then traces a shift to food waste, as in pig slop, and to rubbish generally. A figurative sense, affected or sentimental material, was in use by 1866. The Economist says the AI sense started circulating in the early years of generative AI. In May 2024 Simon Willison championed it, quoting a post by @deepfates that compared slop with spam. In 2025 dictionaries chose it as a word of the year.
- 1650s Slop, a word for a mudhole or puddle since about 1400, comes to mean semi-liquid food.Online Etymology Dictionary, “slop” Etymonline →: source for 1650s
- 1866 By 1866 slop is in figurative use for affected or sentimental material.Online Etymology Dictionary, “slop” Etymonline →: source for 1866
- 2024 Simon Willison adopts slop on his blog as the name for unwanted AI-generated content, quoting a post by @deepfates that compares the word with spam.Simon Willison, “Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content”, simonwillison.net, 8 May 2024 simonwillison.net →: source for 2024
- 2025 YouTube updates its Partner Program monetization policies, effective 15 July, to better identify mass-produced and repetitious content, which it calls inauthentic.YouTube Help, “YouTube policy updates”, July 2025 entry support.google.com →: source for 2025
- 2025 Shaib and colleagues build a taxonomy of slop in text from expert interviews and find that yes-or-no slop judgments, though partly subjective, track coherence and relevance.Shaib, Chakrabarty, Garcia-Olano and Wallace, “Measuring AI ‘Slop’ in Text”, arXiv 2025 arXiv 2509.19163 →: source for 2025
- 2025 Macquarie Dictionary names AI slop its Word of the Year, by committee and public vote, for low-quality generative AI content, often with errors, that users did not request.Macquarie Dictionary, “Word of the Year 2025”, 24 November 2025 macquariedictionary.com.au →: source for 2025
- 2025 Merriam-Webster names slop its 2025 Word of the Year, in the sense of poor-quality digital content that AI turns out in quantity.Merriam-Webster, “2025 Word of the Year: Slop” merriam-webster.com →: source for 2025
- 2026 The American Dialect Society names slop its 2025 Word of the Year. AI slop had been a nominee a year earlier; now the AI sense often goes unsaid.American Dialect Society, 2025 Word of the Year announcement, New Orleans, 9 January 2026 americandialect.org →: source for 2026
In the wild
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“…if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.”
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“Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From”
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“YouTube prepares crackdown on ‘mass-produced’ and ‘repetitive’ videos, as concern over AI slop grows”
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“The general trend so far in 2025 has been way more AI slop than ever before (about 20% of all submissions).”
Daniel Stenberg, curl maintainer, on his blog daniel.haxx.se →: Daniel Stenberg, curl maintainer, on his blog, 14 Jul 2025Archived →: copy of Daniel Stenberg, curl maintainer, on his blog, 14 Jul 2025 -
“AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity”
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“AI ‘slop’ is an increasingly popular term used to describe low-quality AI-generated text, but there is currently no agreed upon definition of this term…”
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“…AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push ‘slop’ into the ecosystem…”
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“We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop … AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use.”
Macquarie Dictionary, Word of the Year committee macquariedictionary.com.au →: Macquarie Dictionary, Word of the Year committee, 24 Nov 2025Archived →: copy of Macquarie Dictionary, Word of the Year committee, 24 Nov 2025 -
“…in 2025 slop could stand on its own, with the AI context often implicitly understood.”
American Dialect Society, Word of the Year announcement americandialect.org →: American Dialect Society, Word of the Year announcement, 9 Jan 2026Archived →: copy of American Dialect Society, Word of the Year announcement, 9 Jan 2026 -
“LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated ‘slop’
Not to be confused with
-
Spam
Spam is unsolicited bulk messaging, such as junk email. Slop is low-quality AI-made content published to feeds, stores and sites. The two overlap when spam is written with AI, which Simon Willison proposed calling slom.
-
Deepfake
A deepfake is synthetic media made to pass as a real person’s image, voice or video, usually to deceive. Slop is made cheaply for volume and attention; it need not imitate anyone or fool anyone.
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Hallucination
A hallucination is a false statement that a model presents as fact. Slop describes low-effort content published in bulk. It often contains errors, but accurate text can still be slop if nobody checked it or asked for it.
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AI-generated content
Any material made with generative AI, including work a person has reviewed and stands behind. Slop is the careless, unwanted part of it. Simon Willison compares the split to promotion, which is not all spam.
Questions
What does AI slop mean?
AI slop is low-quality content made with generative AI, usually in bulk, and put in front of people who did not ask for it. Examples include surreal images on Facebook, mass-uploaded music and chatbot-written bug reports. Merriam-Webster’s definition stresses low quality and large quantities. Macquarie Dictionary named AI slop its Word of the Year for 2025.
Where does the term AI slop come from?
Slop is an old word. It meant a mudhole around 1400 and semi-liquid food by the 1650s, and it later covered food waste such as pig slop. The Economist says the AI sense began circulating in the early years of generative AI. In May 2024 the programmer Simon Willison adopted it, quoting a post that compared slop with spam, the word for unwanted email.
Why is there so much AI slop?
Generative tools make content easy to produce in bulk, and platforms reward attention. 404 Media reported that Facebook’s payouts fund strange AI posts by creators in India, Vietnam and the Philippines. At Deezer, AI-generated tracks passed half of new uploads in June 2026 but drew only 1% to 3% of streams. Up to 85% of those streams in 2025 were fraudulent.
What are platforms doing about AI slop?
In July 2025 YouTube updated its monetization policies to better identify mass-produced and repetitious content. In September 2025 Spotify announced a music spam filter and said it had removed more than 75 million spammy tracks in the previous 12 months. In July 2026 LinkedIn added a button for reporting posts that seem like AI slop.
Is all AI-generated content slop?
No. Simon Willison, an early user of the term, compares slop with spam: plenty of promotion is legitimate, and plenty of AI-generated content is too. Content becomes slop when it is generated without care and pushed at people who did not ask for it. Researchers who studied slop in text found that judging it is partly subjective, though the judgments track coherence and relevance.
Watch
Cite this entry
“AI slop.” SUPERR_dictionary, Superrduperr, 24 Sept. 2026, superrduperr.com/
Superrduperr. (2026, September 24). AI slop. In SUPERR_dictionary. https://superrduperr.com/
Superrduperr. “AI slop.” SUPERR_dictionary. September 24, 2026. https://superrduperr.com/