A years ago if anyone said "AI slop", even if the other person didn't know the term, they'd grasp exactly what it meant without explanation. Well, at least if they had a Facebook feed which, like mine, seemed suddenly to be full of zombie Santas, weird pictures of Jesus, and viral clips of dogs doing geometrically impossible backflips.
Brilliantly, the term "AI slop" managed to sum up that whole cultural moment in two concise syllables. No wonder that in 2025 it was named word of the year by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society.
Plus it didn't just describe a problem, it helped people organise against it, giving the public a shared shorthand for their disgust. Coca-Cola got a hiding for its use of AI in Christmas ads. McDonald's Netherlands pulled a commercial after its brazen use of AI was called out. Activision, too, faced backlash for using AI in promos for its mobile games.
It's been a heady ride. Yet we're only a couple of years in, and I fear the term "AI slop" is already outliving its usefulness.
Why? Because "slop" describes a specific kind of failure: something rushed, cheap and visibly terrible looking. And that kind of AI content may soon be a thing of the past, as more natural-looking content takes over.
Not slop, still problematic
Here's a good example. A few weeks ago I was ironing with YouTube on my TV on in the background. I was only half paying attention, when the video I was watching finished, and the algorithm spooled on to something else.
It seemed to be a scrappy but earnest Doctor Who fan film: a story about a secret military base on the Scottish coast. I was about to turn it off, but then I got caught up in how good it looked.
This clearly wasn't made by three teens and an iPhone. This had high production values. In fact, looked like it had been made by people with serious industry experience and a decent budget for stock video. Intrigued, I kept watching (well, half-watching: I still had ironing to do) for the full, 55 minute episode.
There was the occasional odd moment: a strange pause here, an edit that didn't quite land. But I put this down to passionate fans doing their best, without a BBC budget behind them. It was only afterwards, scrolling through the comments, that I discovered to my shock the whole thing had been generated with AI.
Not touched up with AI. Built entirely from it, right down to the "actor" playing the Doctor. I'd honestly assumed he, and everyone else, was a real actor. Yes, an amateur and occasionally stilted actor, but a human nonetheless. I was utterly wrong. And turns out from the comments, I was not alone.
Whatever you want to call this content, "slop" it wasn't. The movements and gestures of the characters all seemed natural. The dialogue was convincing. No one had too many fingers. And perhaps most importantly, the human-written story and dialogue were actually really good. Which is doubtless the reason it had been shared by so many people and popped up in my algorithm. Basically, if anyone's looking for a decent writer, I'd make a beeline to the creator's door.
In other words this content, which has since been removed from YouTube and put on his own website, was by no means bad. In fact, it was good enough to fool me that I was watching real actors... and that's precisely the problem. When I saw the Black Mirror episode Joan Is Awful in 2023, I thought it was describing what would be technically possible a decade off. Just three years later, and we seem to be here already.
If AI made videos aren't obviously AI, that's so much more dangerous than Al slop, which makes it obvious by, well, being crap. So we're going to need a word for AI content that's competent – impressive even – but raises all the same questions about consent, labour, authenticity, cost, environmental impact and misinformation. And I think we're going to need it sooner rather than later.
