Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the misuse gets bad enough that a major dictionary notices, you know it’s become a cultural phenomenon.

On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

“It’s such an illustrative word,” Merriam-Webster president Greg Barlow told the Associated Press. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying, and a little bit ridiculous.”

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Literary critic, essayist and academic known for his erudite and pugnacious judgments on writers and his fellow dons

John Carey, who has died aged 91, bestrode the ever-narrowing bridge that connects the academic teaching of English literature to the world of literary journalism like a colossus. An Oxford don for more than 40 years – 25 of them as Merton professor – he combined his professional duties with a half-century-long stint on the books pages of the Sunday Times. All this gained him a formidable reputation as the most erudite and possibly the most pugnacious critic of his generation.

Carey’s take-no-prisoners approach to the business of literary journalism was the distinguishing mark of his early descents on Grub Street. He was anti-elitist, anti-Bloomsbury, anti-anything that, as he saw it, patronised the tastes of ordinary readers or hindered their enjoyment of literature, and capable of wielding his pen like a scythe.