AI Slop: Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year—and What It Means for Kids

Editor's note: I wrote this post earlier this year for Psychology Today, but with "slop" just being announced as Meriam-Webster's "word of the year" it seemed appropriate to update and repost it here.

Key points

• Merriam-Webster chose "slop," which they define as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” as its word of the year.

• According to the Europol Innovation Lab, by 2026, up to 90 percent of online content could be AI-generated.

• Research from Common Sense Media finds half of young people ages 14-22 have used generative AI.

• When youth grapple with hard things—like writing an essay on their own—they develop “self-efficacy."

People often ask why I ride an "analog" mountain bike instead of an e-bike. "E-bikes make riding so easy,” they say.

But what if “easy” isn't what I'm after? What if the struggle of getting up a hill under my own power is actually the reward? A climb is what makes the downhill feel so well-earned, and the more you pedal uphill, the stronger you get. Give in to a motor, and you trade away the very thing you came for—that feeling of accomplishment.

No pain, no gain, as they say.

What in the World Does This Have to Do With AI?

I think about AI, specifically generative AI, during all that extra time it takes me to get up a hill without a motor.

Generative AI is AI that creates content—writing, images, and more—and it does make life easier, way easier, particularly when it comes to writing. It’s built into many of the online platforms we use today, always ready and eager to take over writing essays, emails, newsletters, reports, and whatever else.

More and more, the things we read online are cranked out by AI because, somewhere, someone made the decision that this was the easiest way to avoid the impossible hill of writing it themselves.

But using AI to write things for us is making us lazy. In fact, we’re getting soft and our slop is starting to show.

Just ask the editors at Merriam-Webster. They've named "slop"—"digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence”—their word of the year.

An Internet of Slop

Popularized in 2020, the term "slop" is the younger cousin of the word “spam," and it’s taking over our feeds, our searches, our blogs, and even our inboxes. According to a report from the Europol Innovation Lab, by 2026, up to 90 percent of online content could be AI-generated.

It’s useful to stop for a moment and remember how AI works. It trains on massive datasets pulled from the Internet. If the Internet is increasingly flooded with slop, that’s what future models will train, and that's when things are bound to get really sloppy.

What About Kids?

This is the essential question. What kid today wouldn't be tempted to use AI to avoid the daunting task of writing an essay themselves? I mean, the tools are right there, practically begging to be used (for free!) and schools are handing out 1:1 devices like candy.

Already, half (51 percent) of young people ages 14-22 have used generative AI, according to the report, Teen and Young Adult Perspectives on Generative AI. That number is bound to rise, especially as AI increasingly takes over web search, delivering succinct and chatty (if questionably accurate) answers to queries, saving us the time and bother of having to actually click links and verify sources.

Writing, like riding (and even Internet searching, for that matter), takes practice. The more you do it, the stronger your “muscles” become—and the better at it you get. There’s also something deeply satisfying about creating (or finding) something authentic, real, or true on your own.

Other skills are learned through struggle as well. When children grapple with hard things—like writing an essay on their own—they develop essential life skills such as resilience, self-reliance, and confidence. Psychologists call this “self-efficacy,” which is the belief in one’s ability to succeed.

Decades of research, beginning with psychologist Albert Bandura’s foundational work, “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change,” shows that self-efficacy is directly tied to motivation, learning, and achievement. It is an important social-emotional skill, too, explicitly recognized by CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), appearing under the "Self-Awareness" competency in their Social and Emotional Learning framework. When students struggle and then succeed at challenging tasks, they are building all-important self-efficacy skills that will serve them well in virtually every future endeavor.

How Kids Can Use AI Wisely, And Not Sacrifice Their Mental Muscles

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for AI in our kids' lives; it’s obviously here to stay and something kids desperately need to learn how to use wisely. We can start by teaching them how to use the generative AI tools at their disposal in a way that won’t impede their opportunity to develop self-efficacy.

Specifically, if your child wants to use AI to help them write an essay, suggest they:

• Start with their own work: Instead of asking AI to write an entire essay for them, encourage your children to write something, anything, first and then use AI to check spelling and grammar, or even to suggest improvements.

  
  

• Use it to brainstorm: If your child is really struggling to get started writing, suggest they ask an AI tool for ideas or suggestions on a topic or how to get started.

• Let it help them plan: If they have a big project coming up, suggest they use AI to generate a to-do list or to generate an outline they could follow.

  
  

• Practice writing prompts: To get the best work out of an AI tool, your children will still have to write clear directions by crafting thoughtful, detailed, and specific prompts. They should also evaluate the first response they get and keep revising their prompts until they’ve guided AI toward an answer that is truly helpful to them. This makes them active, not passive, users of AI.

It Will Be Better for All of Us

Ensuring that the next generation of humans stays central to the creation of content online will make the Internet better for all of us in the long run.

Personally, I’m already starting to crave online content that’s clearly been written by a real human. That slightly awkward phrase, a quirky personal story, a word used just a bit wrong, even a poorly written essay—these are the telltale signs that a real person has struggled to share something truly personal through their words. AI can’t do that.

That’s why I want kids to grow up in a world where they are encouraged to use their own power—whether it’s riding a bike or writing an essay, or whatever other personal passion offers them opportunity for both struggle and accomplishment.

Because that’s what makes us human.

References:

Europol Innovation Lab (2021). Facing Reality: Law Enforcement and the Challenge of Deepfakes. https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/Europol…

Common Sense Media, Hopelab, & Center for Digital Thriving. (2024). Teen and young adult perspectives on generative AI. https://hopelab.org/teen-young-adult-perspectives-generative-ai/

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

Author:

Digital Literacy educator and advocate Diana Graber, M.A., is the author of "Raising Humans in a Digital World: Helping Kids Build a Healthy Relationship with Technology" (HarperCollins Leadership '19). She is also the founder of Cyber Civics, the popular and innovative middle school literacy curriculum and Cyberwise, a leading online safety and digital literacy organization.