Webster’s Word of the Year - “Slop“

So…. Webster’s Word of the Year is “slop”.
Five gold stars, no notes, go to the top of the class.
The perfect observation for 2025.

As much as I love AI for what it can do, there’s no denying that what’s flooding the internet right now is… slop. Endless, hyper-sanitised content churned out at scale. Technically impressive. Creatively empty.

I’m hoping that once the novelty wears off, once we’ve all seen our friends/pets /ex-colleagues faces dropped into every imaginable scenario, it becomes passé and we collectively slow down on the slop generation. (Or at least become a little more selective.)

Today, while searching for firework images in a stock library I use, I was reminded how pervasive it’s become. Page after page of AI-generated fireworks: aggressively bright, deeply cheesy, and populated by unnervingly wholesome, wide-eyed children. Fortunately, there is a filter to turn off showing AI generated works, but the sheer volume is still distressing.

We're at a weird crossroads. AI can be brilliant. But slop is slop, whether it's written by a lazy human or mass-produced by a prompt.

I wholeheartedly approve of Webster’s Word of the Year.
Pantone’s Colour of the Year, however? Still a hard no.

“Deck the halls with boughs of slop-ey”

This is my chosen slop/stock-photo of the year, that I took a screenshot of in August 2025. I actually went to Adobe Stock today to buy it for this article but the file was not there anymore.

Maybe it got taken down for its full creepiness vibes?