Verum World

‘Slop’ Is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year as AI Content Floods the Internet

Technologies

‘Slop’ Is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year as AI Content Floods the Internet

«AI Slop»: a succinct definition of the current state of the internet.

In a year dominated by the booming AI industry and an overwhelming flood of digital creations, Merriam-Webster has crowned «slop» as its 2025 Word of the Year. This four-letter word acts as a judgment on the sprawling glut of low-quality content now clogging screens and social media feeds everywhere.

Originally used in the 1700s to refer to soft mud and in the 1800s to describe food waste or rubbish, «slop» now takes on a decidedly 21st-century twist. Merriam-Webster defines it as «digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.»

Think ridiculous videos, glitched-out ads, fake news that almost fools you, crappy AI-authored books and, yes, talking animals. Now, even luxury brands like Valentino are pushing out «slop» ads.

«Like slime, sludge and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch,» Merriam-Webster quipped in its announcement, capturing a widespread cultural mood that’s part bemusement, part exasperation with today’s worsening AI landscape.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source on Chrome.

2025: A year defined by the AI content deluge

Tech platforms, both large and small, have grappled with the surge of generative AI content in 2025, from deepfakes to clickbait-style creations that prioritize volume over value. The wave of AI slop reflects not just how easy it’s become to generate content at scale, but also how little of it often resonates meaningfully with human audiences.

Merriam-Webster’s editors say the word stands out because it captures both a cultural trend and a collective sentiment — one that’s less about fear of technology and more about poking fun at how mindlessly content can spread.

Other words that shaped 2025

While slop snagged the top spot, Merriam-Webster also highlighted other terms that defined the year’s discourse, including:

67, a viral slang term born on social media, delighting Gen Alpha with an inside-joke energy.
Performative, used to call out behavior done for show or clout rather than substance.
Touch grass, a phrase urging people to disconnect from digital obsession and reconnect with the real world.
Gerrymander and tariff, words driven by political and economic headlines.

These picks show the breadth of public interest in 2025, ranging from internet culture to politics to how we live with technology.

A global linguistic snapshot of the past year

Merriam-Webster isn’t the only publication weighing in on the year’s language. Here are some other 2025 Words of the Year:

Oxford University Press chose «rage bait,» highlighting content designed to spark outrage and engagement online.
Macquarie Dictionary in Australia spotlighted «AI slop,» which is similar to Merriam-Webster’s theme of digital clutter.
Cambridge Dictionary picked «parasocial,» focusing on one-sided relationships with online personalities and AI chatbots.
Dictionary.com embraced the slang term «67,» a viral and almost meaningless expression that captured a slice of youth culture.

Together, these choices mirror a generation negotiating fatigue, fascination and frustration with the digital world.

Why it matters

For a tech-savvy audience, slop isn’t just a funny word; it’s a symptom of deeper trends in AI deployment, content moderation and cultural perception. Our CNET experts have covered AI slop in depth, from defining what it is and how it’s showing up on the internet and in commercials, to analyzing how it’s turning social media into a wasteland.

As tools for automatic generation become increasingly common and easier to use, the signal-to-noise ratio in digital spaces will only become more pronounced and important. Whether you’re building apps, curating feeds or trying to avoid the next wave of meaningless memes, the 2025 Word of the Year is a reminder that quality still counts and sometimes language itself can call that out with perfect clarity.

Technologies

Samsung S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display Makes Shoulder Surfing a Thing of the Past

You can scroll on the subway in peace.

Picture this: You’re wedged into the middle seat while cruising at 38,000 feet, half watching the clouds and half scrolling through messages you probably should have answered already. The cabin lights are dimmed. The stranger rubbing shoulders next to you adjusts in their seat. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice their gaze flicker toward your screen.

That is a moment when the new Samsung S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display, announced during the company’s Galaxy Unpacked 2026, can quietly step in.

Unlike old-fashioned screen protectors that darken your display permanently, the new feature is built directly into the Galaxy S26 Ultra (starting at $1,300) panel. It is not a film you stick on top; it’s a part of the hardware itself, working seamlessly with the software.

During the Unpacked event, Samsung brought out Miles Franklin from MilesAboveTech to demo the feature: to Miles, looking straight at the screen, everything remained crisp, bright and color-accurate. To anyone trying to peek from the side, like those of us watching the demo, the content fades into shadow. From this perspective, the screen might as well be off.

«It’s seriously one of the coolest features I’ve seen on a phone in years,» Franklin said while onstage at Unpacked.

How Privacy Display works

Under the hood, the technology relies on a combination of directional backlighting and an adaptive pixel layer that controls how light is emitted across angles. Traditional displays spread light broadly so multiple people can see the screen at once. The S26 Ultra does the opposite when privacy mode is active. It funnels light forward in a tighter beam, limiting lateral visibility without sacrificing clarity for the primary user.

Sensors play a role, too. Using the front-facing camera and ambient awareness algorithms, the device can recognize when additional faces appear within viewing range. If it senses someone hovering nearby or glancing from the side, it can automatically trigger enhanced privacy mode. You can also have the process automate when certain notifications pop up or when opening specific apps, like those for banking or social media.

Back on the plane, you can now continue typing. The stranger next to you adjusts again — perhaps curious, perhaps bored. It doesn’t matter. Your screen remains yours.

Technologies

This One Killer Feature Sets the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Apart From All Other Phones

Commentary: Samsung needed to give us a reason to be excited about its latest flagship. It delivered.

There are so many reasons not to buy a new phone in 2026. For starters, our existing phones last longer than ever if we take care of them. Plus, most new phones are way too similar, not only to each other, but to last year’s batch. Finally, most of us won’t have our heads easily turned by yet another AI sales pitch.

But on Wednesday, at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event in San Francisco, the company gave us a genuinely compelling reason to consider upgrading to its new top-end flagship, the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Its killer feature has nothing to do with AI (although Samsung is still beating that drum as loudly as every phone-maker out there).

In fact, it has nothing to do with software at all. Instead, it’s an innovation in hardware: Privacy Display, which offers pixel-level privacy that prevents anyone beside you from seeing what’s on your screen.

Privacy Display works in both portrait and landscape, with the pixels dispersing light in a way that will darken parts of the screen if you’re not looking at it straight on. You can choose whether to apply it to specific apps, to notifications or for when you’re inputting PINs or passwords. Access from Quick Settings makes it easy to turn on and off on the go, like when you suspect someone on the bus is reading over your shoulder, for example.

The reason the Privacy Display is such a compelling feature is that it’s simple to demonstrate, and it offers benefits that are easy to understand, said Ben Wood, CMO and chief analyst at CCS Insight. «Unlike a secondary-market privacy screen protector affixed to the phone’s display, it is not an ‘all or nothing’ solution,» he added.

On the surface, privacy doesn’t feel especially sexy as tech features go. But it is important to people. You only need to observe how central Apple has made privacy to its entire brand to see that people place significant value in technology they feel they can trust.

For Samsung, placing privacy front and center may be a winning strategy, giving its latest flagship a genuine edge over competitors that they can’t match simply by pushing out a software update. Privacy Display also elevates the Ultra even within Samsung’s own wide stable of phones, and it goes some way (although perhaps not all the way) toward justifying that $1,300 price tag.

«At face value, the Galaxy S26 Series devices differ little from [Samsung’s] predecessors launched just over a year ago,» Wood said. «Without this capability, the Galaxy S26 Ultra would have been an extremely tough sell.»

But Samsung may want to capitalize on this competitive advantage while it can. «I also expect this to become a benchmark feature over the next few years on all premium smartphones and other products, such as laptops,» Wood said.

That’s something to look forward to if you plan to upgrade in 2027 or beyond, but for now this is an Ultra exclusive, so you’ll need to be feeling flush if you plan to be a Privacy Display early adopter.