From this month's "The Economist"

Readers should prepare themselves: they will probably experience brain rot more often, thanks to our word of the year. Our pick’s rise was spurred by OpenAI’s release of Sora, a generative artificial-intelligence (ai) platform that can create videos based on a prompt. Suddenly social-media feeds were filled with such clips. A term that started circulating in the early years of generative AI is now everywhere: “slop”.

The word, of course, is far from new: the oed’s first citation is from the 15th century. Its meaning has evolved from mud and slush, through a weak liquid used as a poorly nourishing food, to any kind of food scraps, to nonsense or rubbish.

Slop merchants clog up the internet with drivel. Enter a health question on Google and see how many of the top results are brand-new webpages with AI-written prose. Or scroll through Instagram and see how long it takes to come across a video that is made up of fake clips and an AI voiceover. Or head to X and see if you can distinguish the real MAGA accounts from those that were revealed (by a new “About this account” feature) to be slop-shops in Pakistan, Nigeria or Thailand.

It is distressing to imagine a world drowning in slop, so think of the positives. If the news ecosystem is sodden with slop, trust in established organisations might rebound. (Research has found that, after being asked to distinguish AI photographs from real ones, test subjects show a greater willingness to pay for a respectable newspaper.) If social-media sites become congested with slop, either those platforms will have to get serious about content moderation or else their users will shut them off. A case, then, for sloptimism?

I like it :-D