Artificial intelligence (AI) has become widely used, so it’s not surprising to see Merriam-Webster choose an AI-related term as 2025’s “word of the year.”
The go-to dictionary for The Associated Press says slop – “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence” – is the leading word of 2025.
The dictionary publisher says people saw a “flood of slop” online this year, and who would disagree? Not the Wall Street Journal, which said it’s “everywhere.” Not CNN, which said in one headline that “AI slop has turned social media into an antisocial wasteland.”
AI has become so accessible that it’s easier than ever to make garbage memes and other slop, sometimes as propaganda that drives polarization, Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year.
The stuff AI produces is, indeed, often sloppy. AI-generated text often contains “hallucinations” such as ChatGPT telling users there’s a “world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot,” or GPT4 saying just one person survived the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. (Hallucinate, you may recall, was Dictionary.com’s choice for word of the year in 2023.)
People in academia have noticed that AI not only hallucinates facts, it fabricates false citations. For instance, Ben Williamson of the University of Edinburgh recently noticed a paper he was reviewing cited two Ben Williamson papers that he never wrote.
“This is not just a rare mistake or a quirky side effect,” Nayeem Islam remarks in a June 2025 Medium post. “It is a systemic issue that spans nearly all major AI language models in active use.”
Hallucinations happen because AI language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini use “pattern-matching and prediction algorithms” to generate text and “possess no built-in mechanism for fact-checking,” Islam explains.
So, if you’re going to “write” with AI, how should you correct for this inherent flaw?
Well, my blunt advice is simply “don’t be lazy.” You’ve already saved time generating copy via AI. Why not use a little of that saved time to read over what’s been generated and do some fact-checking?
Also, or alternatively, you could hire someone to do that for you. I’m available.