AI slop is Macquarie’s 2025 Word of the Year. I applaud the choice – but was bored by the shortlist
- Written by Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor in Writing, The University of Queensland
AI slop is Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025. It also won the people’s choice vote. The dictionary defines the word as “low-quality content created by generative AI [artificial intelligence], often containing errors, and not requested by the user”.
I’ve spent the last year researching the solicitous, duplicitous and ubiquitous generative AI – and I’ve been drowning in AI slop. So I applaud the choice.
This year began with Arwa Mahdawi’s Guardian column in January, warning the internet is “rapidly being overtaken by AI slop” – and sharing bizarre examples found on Facebook: AI-generated images of Jesus made out of shrimps.
But AI slop is not all fun, games and eye-rolling.
An AI journalist for business magazine Forbes wrote in September that AI slop is replacing once-valued professions. And a social media entrepreneur who turned to the “side gig” of creating AI content after being laid off by an internet company says it’s become the latest trend for earning side income, similar to Uber or street vending.
Overall, though I applauded the winner, I thought Macquarie Dictionary’s 2025 shortlist was banal, even boring.
Where, I thought, are the colourful expressions of days long gone? The “bachelor’s handbag” (a takeaway roast chicken in a plastic bag)? The “milkshake duck” (a person viewed popularly by the media, until a questionable discovery makes their popularity plunge)? “Goblin mode”? None of them seem to have stuck around, but they were fun at the time.
‘Blandification’?
A committee chooses a shortlist of 15 for the Word of the Year from the list of new entries and senses included in the annual update of the Macquarie Dictionary online. Then, the public are invited to vote for the People’s Choice Word of the Year.
“Blandification” – a term I thought I’d coined, though it’s been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1969 – doesn’t begin to describe many of the 15 expressions Macquarie asked the public to vote on.
“Australian sushi.” (This means pretty much what you’d think: the kind of nori hand rolls often sold as takeaway, “often containing non-traditional fillings”.) “Bathroom camping.” (Isolating in a bathroom cubicle to seek solitude, avoid work or regulate emotions like anxiety or stress.) “Blind box.” (A mystery box containing an unseen collectable toy or figurine.)
And a term anyone with or around kids seems to both know about … and be a bit bewildered by: “six-seven.” (A “nonsense” expression beloved by kids and teens, connected to a rap track and a basketballer who is six feet and seven inches tall.)
The absurdly elusive term is apparently making life hell for maths teachers. It has already morphed into the even more ridiculous “six-sendy” for “going all out” and “41”, for “nothing and everything at once”.
Dictionary.com chose “six-seven” as its Word of the Year – and calls it “the logical endpoint of being perpetually online, scrolling endlessly, consuming content fed to users by algorithms trained by other algorithms”.
Social psychologist Adam Mastroianni recently said we’re in “a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane”. Macquarie’s selection mostly epitomises this sentiment.
One of the Macquarie committee’s two honourable mentions was “clanker”, one of those words that changes meaning over time. A term with Star Wars origins, “clanker” once referred to a literal, metallic robot. Today, it’s a slur for “an artificial intelligence-driven robot” – like ChatGPT and other forms of AI – that performs tasks a human otherwise would.
The other was medical misogyny: entrenched prejudice against women in the context of medical treatment and knowledge, especially in the area of reproductive health.
Parasocial and vibe coding
Macquarie’s AI slop is mirrored in the other dictionaries’ choices for 2025’s Word of the Year, which collectively reflect the pernicious influence of social media.
Cambridge Dictionary chose parasocial: a connection someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a fictional character or AI. For example, the millions of “Swifties” who sent congratulatory messages to Taylor Swift after she announced her engagement.
Collins Dictionary chose “vibe coding”, which describes “making an app or website by describing it to [AI] rather than by writing programming code manually”. The managing director of Collins says it “perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology”.
Arch-sceptic professor Gary Marcus, who researches the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, describes AI as “a souped-up regurgitating machine trained on mined, copyrighted material”.
It’s all rather depressing – but there is a groundswell against AI-generated content. Feminist writer Caitlin Moran, in her Times column, has been scathing about AI slop, describing it making ludicrous suggestions like using glue to get cheese to stick to a pizza, “to give it more tackiness”.
Vote for your favourite words
If you wish you had the chance to vote for a word of the year, it’s not too late. Voting for the Oxford English Dictionary’s People’s Choice closes December 2.
The American Dialect Society is the only Word of the Year announced after the end of the calendar year. It has other categories, too, such as “Most useful/likely to succeed”, “Informal Word of the year” and “Euphemism of the Year”.
The winners will be decided in a live, two-day event with the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans, on January 8 and 9. Sounds like fun!
Authors: Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor in Writing, The University of Queensland
