In 2025, Merriam-Webster bequeathed the title of ‘word of the year’ to slop. You’ve heard of this word, your friends have heard of this word, your penpal in Moldova has heard of this word, even your grandma has heard of this word. Just like its own definition, the word ‘slop’ is everywhere.

Merriam-Webster defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” But slop is by no means some new word. It showed up in the 1700s meaning "soft mud," got promoted to "food waste" at some point in the 1800s, and has now been drafted into the AI wars. It’s become a sort of Rorschach test — terminally-online folks now argue endlessly over what slop actually means, insisting it's been totally bastardized to cover a dozen disparate things.

As Wu-Tang Clan once opined, “[slop] rules everything around me.”

AI can do mind-warping cool shit: it can build the website for that niche need of yours; shed light on your finances; conjure up a prototype for work so you can show others the vision instead of merely describing it; connect the dots on your opaque health issue. The list goes on.

But imho, for all its upside, AI has done real damage by flooding the radio waves (by that I mean the entire internet) with slop. Many of the most popular clips and videos across YouTube and FAI-generated. acebook are now

AI isn’t the first technology to attempt to automate writing, but what makes it special is its ability to scale. According to a recent New Yorker piece, “before ChatGPT, more than 98 per cent of all English-language articles published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half.”

To grasp just how strange that is, zoom out for a second. For almost the entire history of the written word, words were precious because they were scarce. Every book had to be copied by hand, one aching page at a time, oftentimes on animal hide that was more expensive than buying a house today. The single grandest collection of books in the medieval Western world would fit on the shelves of one ordinary college professor today.

So it's no surprise people fear this 'slopacalypse' will kill the internet, turning it into an uninhabitable virtual wasteland. Bot farms were the precursor; AI is the finisher. The head of Product at X/Twitter explains how he’s bracing the platform for the onslaught:

And it's not just AI making its own slop. AI is also pouring gasoline on the channels that produced pre-AI slop (B.C.S., if you will). Influencers now lean on AI to schedule, outline, and generate their content — many of them the same people who've been churning out 'Productivity Slop' for years. As Cuckfucius (yes, his pseudonym, lol) puts it:

Not only is AI flooding the world with its own slop, but it’s also pouring gasoline on the channels that produced pre-AI slop (B.C.S., if you will). Influencers now lean on AI to schedule, outline, and generate their content, many of them the same people who've been churning out 'Productivity Slop' for years. As Cuckfucius (yes, his pseudonym, lol) explains:

“Productivity Slop masquerades as helpful, actionable content—how to start a business, how to study more effectively—and to a degree it can be genuinely helpful…

A quick recap:

Ok, so AI is manufacturing slop at an industrial scale, B.C.S. channels are using AI to manufacture their slop faster, and the word itself has gotten so big, so elastic, that it's started spraying and praying from the hip, slapping anything that looks low-effort, mass-produced, and faintly low-quality.

Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps to your utter chagrin, I am here to report that some of the things we know and love are being targeted as slop, when they are actually not slop! I’m going out on my shield.

Think back to the etymology of ‘slop’. Long before slop meant AI, it meant mud, then food waste, then, per Merriam-Webster's own announcement, the stuff "we ate in our bowls." The word has come home to roost, because somewhere in the crossfire of the AI discourse, the humble fast-casual bowl got caught in the blast radius and took a killshot.

I'm here to tell you: slop bowls are delicious, and they deserve a defense.

First they came for the Olive Garden breadsticks, and I did not speak out — because I was not, technically, an Olive Garden person.

Then they came for the Chipotle burrito bowls, and I did not speak out — because I had already eaten two that week.

Then they came for the Sweetgreen bowls, and I did not speak out — because I hadn’t really tried it.

Then they came for my bowl — the Cava bowl — and there was no one left to speak for me.

Eat the bowl, touch grass, and hunker down, because we’ll survive the slopacalypse together.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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