What is AI slop?

You search for a recipe and land on a page that calls it "this delicious dish" six times. It tells you the dish is perfect for any occasion. It never tells you the oven temperature. Nobody wrote that page with you in mind. Software turned it out in bulk, and quite likely nobody read it before it went up. There's a word for that now: slop.

In December 2025, the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster picked "slop" as its word of the year. Its definition is plain: digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence (AI). The word itself is old. It once meant soft mud, and later food scraps for pigs. People reached for it again because it fit how a lot of their feeds had started to feel.¹²

You've probably met a few kinds already.

• Articles that fill a page with words and never get to the point.
• Product photos of things that don't exist, or don't look like that.
• Videos stitched together fast, made to be clicked rather than watched.

What they share is how they were made: quickly, in large numbers, with no one checking.²

When making a page costs almost nothing, some people make thousands of them. Each page carries ads, and each visit earns a little money. In 2023, NewsGuard, a company that rates news websites, found ads from more than a hundred well-known brands running on sites filled with AI-written articles that had little or no human oversight. One of those sites was putting out more than a thousand articles a day. Nobody reads that many. The pages are there to catch a search and earn a click.³⁴

Slop tends to give itself away in four ways.

• It's vague, and it circles a point without landing on it.
• It repeats itself, often the same phrase again and again.
• It names no source you could check.
• And there's no person behind it: no author, no date, no one to ask.

None of these proves a machine wrote something, since people wrote plenty of junk before AI. But when you see all four together, you can move on without a second thought.

The tool doesn't decide to publish anything. It writes what it's asked to write. Then a person decides whether to check it, fix it, or post it as it is. Slop happens when someone picks volume over care. That's a choice, and plenty of people make the other one.

Good work made with AI looks different. Someone uses a chatbot for a first draft, then checks every fact, adds the sources, cuts the filler, and puts their own name on it. You might never guess a tool helped, because a person did the part that counts: deciding what's true and worth saying. That's augment, not replace, in practice.⁵

The same test works on what you make. Before you post something a tool helped write, read it once the way a stranger would. Does it say something specific? Could someone check it? Would you put your name on it? Think of the last thing you shared. How would it do?