slop

What does slop mean?

Slop names content made to fill a slot rather than to say something: a hundred near identical listicles, product reviews by writers who never saw the product, images with too many fingers, comment sections where forty accounts agree in the same four sentences. The word carries its farmyard history with it, which is why it sticks. It is not a neutral description of machine output but a judgement about effort, and it also covers human work produced at slop speed. Readers now use it as a filter question, asking whether a page was written for them or for a search index, and it sits alongside brainrot in the same vocabulary.

Where does slop come from?

Slop meant soft mud and then pig feed long before the internet borrowed it. Developer Simon Willison gave it the current sense on his blog in May 2024, applying it to the flood of cheap generated material, and the derivative vocabulary followed, including sloppers and slopocalypse. Merriam-Webster named slop its word of the year for 2025 in December 2025, defining it as digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.

How to use slop

• The whole comment section was slop, forty identical paragraphs praising a product nobody had touched.
• I wrote that product description by hand in twenty minutes and my editor still called it slop.