Low-quality, mass-produced content generated by AI — text, images, or video churned out in bulk without human care or quality control. The term describes the flood of AI-generated spam articles, synthetic social media posts, and garish images that have come to clutter the internet. Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year, defining it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

For journalists, slop is both a beat and a hazard. On the beat side, reporters have documented how content farms spin up hundreds of fake local news websites overnight using AI, how state-sponsored propaganda operations flood social media with low-quality synthetic videos and clunky AI translations, and how Amazon has been overwhelmed with AI-generated books. As a hazard, slop complicates research: search results, social media feeds, and even public comment dockets can be polluted with AI-generated junk, making it harder to identify genuine sources. Data reporters using AI to process documents or scrape the web should also be aware that training data is increasingly contaminated with slop, which can degrade model performance over time.

The term is often compared to "spam" — the way a casual, slightly gross word became the universal label for a whole category of digital pollution. Slop carries a similar trajectory: informal, mocking in tone, but increasingly precise in meaning. It's related to hallucination, but where hallucinations describe AI confidently making things up, slop describes the deliberate mass production of AI content with little regard for accuracy or quality.