The timing feels significant. "Slop" emerged as shorthand for AI-generated garbage, but it's already being stretched to cover any output someone doesn't like. I've seen it applied to legitimate content that just happened to be formatted cleanly or use common phrasing.
The interesting thing is slop predates AI - there was always plenty of low-effort human-generated content farming for clicks or SEO. The word just gave us a convenient label for something we couldn't quite articulate before.
What changes is volume. When producing mediocre content costs almost nothing, the noise floor rises for everyone. The word of the year isn't really about AI - it's about our collective anxiety over signal-to-noise ratios.
I actually think in practice the meaning has always been "things I dislike". Before AI you could see it applied to all kinds of things in media, WWE is slop, Soap Operas are slop, Genre Fiction is slop. It's almost exclusively a pejorative based on taste, intended to throw scorn on what other people enjoy. When a person uses it I stop listening, because essentially the speaker has stopped saying anything of value.
The interesting thing is slop predates AI - there was always plenty of low-effort human-generated content farming for clicks or SEO. The word just gave us a convenient label for something we couldn't quite articulate before.
What changes is volume. When producing mediocre content costs almost nothing, the noise floor rises for everyone. The word of the year isn't really about AI - it's about our collective anxiety over signal-to-noise ratios.