Have you noticed that everyone seems to be talking about slop these days? There are fashions in words, and this one has become very fashionable indeed.

My impression is that it started with descriptions of many of the products of AI. Now that I look it up, I see that is true but that it began in 2025:

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.

The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up.

“AI Slop is Everywhere,” warned The Wall Street Journal, while admitting to enjoying some of those cats. “AI Slop Has Turned Social Media Into an Antisocial Wasteland,” reported CNET.

It’s a pretty apt word for that sort of thing. But the use of the term has spread so much that the expression itself threatens to become … slop. It’s used for poor arguments, for obfuscating BS, for bad research, for Arday’s doctoral thesis, for anything and everything in the communication field that a person doesn’t like.