Jargon:AI slop
2 min read
Say this at the party
“Cheap, careless AI-made stuff that nobody asked for. Slop is to AI what spam is to email.”
In plain English
AI slop is pictures, videos, articles, books and songs made by AI in bulk, cheaply and without care. It's usually there to grab clicks or make money. Nobody asked for it.
Simon Willison has a handy test. If something is "mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn't ask for it", it's slop. So the problem isn't AI itself. It's skipping the care and the checking.
It's a proper word now, but a fuzzy one. There's no agreed definition, and critics point out that lots of human-made stuff has always been forgettable too. There's even an office version, "workslop": AI-made work that looks good but has nothing in it.
Where it came from
"Slop" is centuries old. It meant soft mud in the 1700s and pig food waste in the 1800s. People on 4chan, Hacker News and YouTube started using it for AI rubbish when AI image tools arrived in 2022. On 7 May 2024 a user called @deepfates tweeted that slop was becoming the name for unwanted AI content, like spam for email. British programmer Simon Willison blogged about it the next day and helped take it mainstream. Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society both made "slop" their 2025 Word of the Year, and Australia's Macquarie Dictionary picked "AI slop".
See it in action
You look up things to do in Ottawa and find a Microsoft travel guide written by AI. It lists the city's food bank as a tourist attraction. That's slop: made fast, never properly checked, and pushed at people who didn't ask for it.
What people get wrong
- Not all AI content is slop. What makes it slop is a lack of care and checking, not the use of AI.
- Simon Willison didn't invent it. He made it famous, but people were already using it.
- Slop doesn't always look weird. Lots of it is dull and realistic, so it slips past without you noticing.
- It isn't the same as fake news. Some slop misleads people, but much of it is just pointless filler made for ad money.
Go deeper
- PostSimon Willison, 2024Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated contentThe post that took the word mainstream, with the best test for what counts as slop.
- ArticleMerriam-Webster, 20252025 Word of the Year: SlopThe dictionary definition, the word's muddy history, and why people mocked slop but still ate it up.
- ArticleAmerican Dialect Society, 20262025 Word of the Year Is "Slop"Language experts vote slop the word of the year.
- ArticleYiying Li, ABC News (Australia), 2025'AI slop' crowned word of the year 2025 in Macquarie Dictionary's committee and people's choice categoriesHow "AI slop" won over both the experts and the public in Australia.
- ArticleWikipedia contributors, 2026AI slopA broad round-up of where the word came from and famous examples. Check the original reports for details.
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