Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year, in the sense of low-quality content mass-produced with generative AI. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary and The Economist picked "AI slop" as their words of the year the same season. The usage spread through English-speaking circles from around 2024 and is generally credited to the developer Simon Willison; in May 2024 the Guardian had introduced it as the word that follows "spam" and "junk". Fake news, mass-produced videos, articles that merely look plausible — the year settled on a shared word for a web filling up with generative AI output. Japanese adopted the term as-is, as "AIスロップ".