NetLingo 2025 Word of the Year: slop

Posted by Erin

Thanks AI, you've made it super hard to separate the real from the fake! That's why the NetLingo 2025 Word of the Year is: slop. Slop actually sums up a lot this year...

From sloppy TACO tariffs (Trump Always Chickens Out) to the Bunnies On Trampoline meme (then the made-up up songs about this farce), to the end of the "slop bowl" era (apparently we've soured on the lunchfare practice of picking your own ingredients and piling it on rice and greens), AI is officially here and it's already out of control. Join me as I examine some sloppy trends and provide simple tips on how to steer your way through this new muddy landscape.

As defined by NetLingo, slop refers to unwanted artificial intelligence intruding in your activities, including the AI-generated results by search engines. Like spam, it also refers to annoying, low quality AI-generated content that you didn’t ask to see. Unfortunately there is a huge amount of AI-generated content on the internet that amounts to little more than slop. 

Humans are creating a lot of the AI slop, but so is AI itself. Known as hallucinations, these can be just as dangerous as a meatspace hallucination. AI hallucinations are when an a language model or image generator, produces false, misleading, or nonsensical information... that it presents as factual. There are many reasons why these errors occur but who cares! If the biased AI model lacks data or misinterprets prompts, you'll get incorrect facts, made-up citations, and distorted images such as: 

  1. When a lawyer uses AI to find legal precedents but it creates references to non-existent cases.
  2. When an AI model provides incorrect financial data about a company.
  3. When Google's Gemini AI generates historically inaccurate images.
  4. When an AI chatbot advises you to put glue on pizza. All Slop.
Did you know an AI affair is now grounds for divorce? Courts are increasingly seeing clients cite emotional bonds with AI companions as reasons for marital strain, thus opening up a new legal frontier in family law. And AI is rapidly moving beyond chatbots...

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, released Sora which could become a completely new platform for socializing and entertainment because it's quicker to post videos on Sora than it is to film and upload them to TikTok. Open AI said they designed Sora with social media fatigue in mind, to make scrolling a more positive experience (but it’s hard to see any positive in this)!

Sora marries the worst aspect of ChatGPT (it's ability to get users hooked on it) with the worst aspect of social media (the endless scrolling of mindless vertical videos). Handing Americans the ability to create perfectly realistic fake videos and a TikTok-like social network on which they can be shared is like taking heroin and mixing it with…more heroin. It's AI slop and it’s an apt description of Sora’s mucky, murky, reality-corroding pool of virality, said Scott Rosenberg in Axios. Already his Sora feed is full of Jesuses, SpongeBobs, dogs driving cars, and endless jokes about OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. It may be hilarious for sixth graders but for the rest of us, it’s another step on the path to a new media world where verification vanishes, unreality dominates, everything blurs into everything else, and nothing carries any informational or emotional weight.

What is clear is that not everything can be taken at face value during this era of generative artificial intelligence. AI video apps alone are becoming so advanced you can barely be distinguish the real from the fake. Here are a few TIPS to spot AI slop: 

  • Consider the Likelihood - The easiest way to detect AI slop is to ask whether what you are seeing is even possible... so if it is not plausible in the real world, then it’s obviously AI-generated. For example, a horse on the moon or a chair made of avocado just isn't believable in the real world.
  • Listen for Garbled Speech - AI-generated speech has not mastered natural-sounding speaking cadence. In fact the voices and rhythms generated by AI slop make garbled sounds that come across as flat. Human beings would never produce that kind of garbled quality, because we literally can’t! 
  • Check the Metadata - Hah, my husband can't stand this word, but metadata is what it's all about. Metadata is information that is automatically attributed to content when it’s created. Every photo and video online has metadata no matter whether it was human or AI-created. This metadata includes the type of camera used to take a photo, the date and time a video was captured, the location, and the filename, so if you're suspicious you can figure it out. Plus many AI-generated videos will have content credentials that denote its AI origins.
  • Check for Watermarks - One of the easiest ways to spot AI-generated videos is by watermarks. Videos made with Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, include a watermark at the bottom left. But of course some removal tools are nearly perfect if the video is very simple so look for aspongy block where the watermark may have been removed.
  • Consider the Source - Viral content gets spread from unknown accounts so it it's on social media or a meme page, it's time to sharpen your instincts and don't be gullible and pass it on. Which means the onus is on us again to remain vigilant. Back in the day, savvy users knew DBEYR! In these unprecedented, AI-slop-filled times, you've got to stop automatically, unquestioningly believing everything you see online.

While other dictionaries have chosen their Words of the Year including parasocial, vibe coding, and 67, I think "slop" captures an experience across the board (not just for celebrity seekers, programmers and kids). All this sloppiness makes it clear that the onus is on you - the consumer - yet again to take extra measures to protect yourself. Even if it seems innocent enough, it's not. It is pervasive and it's up to you stay grounded in reality and not sucked in. 

Ronald McDonald in a police chase, Jesus joking about “last supper vibes,” and Sam Altman getting arrested for shoplifting. That’s a small taste of what you may find on OpenAI’s new social app, where “everything is fake,” said Gerrit De Vynck and Drew Harwell in The Washington Post. Sora is the AI giant’s effort to challenge TikTok with an addictive platform on which “every second of audio and video is generated by artificial intelligence.” Users can insert themselves into “just about every scenario imaginable,” with frighteningly high realism and AI-generated audio. OpenAI initially said it would “block any copyrighted characters” only if rights holders requested it, then quickly backtracked to give IP owners more control. Still, in the days after Sora’s release, users quickly tested the boundaries of AI video’s potential. One AI filmmaker used Sora to create a satirical “TV commercial for a children’s play set that features a ‘hidden massage room,’ in reference to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” Another slop who dominated our conversation this year. 

I vote enjoy your 2026 online content without a side of slop!

- Erin Jansen, Social Psychologist, Internet Historian, Online Specialist, Founder of NetLingo.com