The Word

In December 2025, Merriam-Webster picked its Word of the Year: "slop."^[1] The dictionary defined it as digital content of low quality, produced in large amounts by artificial intelligence.

The word slop is not new, but it's meaning has changed. Hundreds of years ago, slop meant soft mud. Then it meant food waste (pig slop, rubbish). In 2025, it found a new meaning for a new era: the flood of AI-generated text, images, and video that fills the internet without saying anything worth our time.

Slop caught on quickly because people already knew the feeling:

You are reading something online and you realize, halfway through, that no human wrote it. No one thought about it. No one cared whether it was true or useful.
A machine produced it because someone typed a prompt and hit publish.

That is slop.

How Much Is Out There?

A lot! More than most people realize.

In April 2025, a company called Ahrefs studied nearly a million new web pages. They found that 74 percent contained AI-generated content.^[2] By mid-2025, about half of all new content published online was written by AI.

A study from the University of Florida found that the flood was making it harder for real writers, artists, and creators to be seen.^[3] Their work was getting buried under mountains of content that cost nothing to produce and said nothing worth hearing.

The internet was not getting better. It was getting louder.

Why Does It Happen?

Slop exists because producing it is easy.

Here is how most people use AI to write in 2026: They open a chat app like ChatGPT. They type something vague, like "write me a blog post about productivity." The AI produces 800 words in seconds. The person copies those words and publishes them. No research. No thought. No editing. No checking whether the facts are right or if the argument makes sense, because it sounds good enough.

This is not writing with AI. This is asking a machine to fill space.

AI tools themselves are impressive. ChatGPT can write clearly. Claude can reason through complex ideas. Perplexity can research topics with real sources attached. The problem is not the tools. The problem is what happens between the person and the tool: nothing.

AI did not create the slop problem. The absence of a method did.
– Alexander Somma

Ben Thompson, an independent technology analyst, noticed this early. He pointed out that when producing words costs nothing, the only thing that matters is deciding which words are worth producing.^[4] That decision requires human judgment. It cannot be automated.

People producing slop skip that step.

Why Should You Care?

Three reasons:

Slop wastes your time. Every minute you spend reading something that says nothing is a minute you could have spent reading something that matters. When half the internet is filler, finding the good stuff gets harder for everyone.

Slop makes real work invisible. If you are a student who spent three weeks on a research paper, or a writer who spent a month on an article, your work is now competing with thousands of pieces that took thirty seconds to generate. The quality is not the same. But the volume is overwhelming.

Slop cannot be owned. This is the part most people do not know. In 2023, a judge ruled that works created by AI alone cannot receive copyright protection.^[5] If a person's only contribution is typing a prompt and accepting whatever the machine produces, the result belongs to no one. It is not legally theirs. Slop is not just bad writing, it is writing that nobody can claim.

How Do You Spot It?

Slop has patterns. Once you learn to see them, you will start to see them everywhere.

Look for these signs:

• The writing uses phrases like "In today's rapidly evolving landscape" or "Let's unpack this" or "It's important to note that." These are patterns that AI models repeat because they appeared thousands of times in their training data.

• Every paragraph is roughly the same length and the rhythm never changes. There are no short, punchy sentences followed by longer ones.

• No person is named, no specific place, date, or number appears. The piece feels like it could be about any topic in any industry, and changing three words would make it fit somewhere else entirely.

• There is no argument (a point of view with supported evidence). The piece describes a topic but never takes a position on it. It summarizes without deciding. It informs without thinking.

If a piece has two or more of these signs, it is likely slop. If a piece has all four of these signs, it is almost certainly slop.

What Is the Alternative?

The alternative is not refusing to use AI. That ship has sailed. Hundreds of millions of people use AI tools every day, and many of them use those tools well.

The alternative is using AI with a method. That means:

• Doing research before you write, not letting the AI guess.

• Deciding what your piece is about before you ask the AI to draft it. Not the topic. The argument.

• Reading what the AI produces and rewriting it in your own voice. Cutting the parts that sound generic. Adding the parts that only you could know.

• Checking the facts and naming your sources. Making sure that what you publish is specific, honest, and worth someone's time.

The people who do this produce work that is theirs, legally and creatively.

The people who skip these steps produce slop.

The Deciding

The slop problem has a solution. It is not better AI and it is not more AI.

It is you – in the chair, making the decisions that a machine cannot make for you. Choosing what is worth saying. Choosing how to say it. Choosing to care whether the person reading it learns something, feels something, or walks away changed. You are the one who decides what to build with it.

That is the difference between writing and slop.

Footnotes

This article is part of the Sage.Education series. For the full version with additional depth on the method, quality gates, and the ownership question, see "The Slop Problem" on Sage.is.