Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2025-share
“Your mother shubscribed to makshimum, unbounded shcale last night, Trebek.”
An academic sneer delivered through the arXiv-o-tube:
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational system that recursively generates hierarchical thought structures. The language system grows with minimal external input and can readily distinguish between real language and impossible languages.
John Scalzi:
I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.
There’s a version animated in the style of the '70s Star Trek cartoon that makes it legitimately great.
Purdue and Google recently expanded their strategic partnership, emphasizing the importance of public-private partnerships that are essential to accelerating innovation in AI.
Translation: somebody’s getting paid off
🎶 Money makes the world go 'round 🎶
This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.
And just think, he’s been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.
I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.
Only four (August 2021).
The best I ever saw was a reply to a news story to the effect of, “If I were ever invited swimming in the Murderkill River, I would just not go.”
(This might be the original. Then again, it might not.)
J. Mijin Cha writes:
My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.
Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland’s journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.
I would simply not name my airplane company “Boom”.
“How do you keep yourself from going insane?”
“I tell myself I’m a character from a book who comes to life and is also a robot!” (Hubert Farnsworth giggle)
deleted by creator
No one point out that “keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs” is also a trope.
Handshake meme of Yud and Rorschach praising Harry S Truman
From the comments:
I got Claude to read this text and explain the proposed solution to me
Once you start down the Claude path, forever will it dominate your destiny…
Growing up in Alabama, I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but I definitely had the feeling when meeting some people, “Given the bullshit you alreasy buy, there is nothing in principle stopping you from going full fash.” I get the same feeling now from Yuddites: “There is nothing in principle stopping you from going full Zizian.”
The people who build these products aren’t bad or evil.
No, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them just are bad and evil.
With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise.
[citation needed]
[to a source that’s not laundered slop, ya dingbats]
A belief system that inculates the believer into thinking that the work is the most important duty a human can perform, while also isolating them behind impenetrable pseudo-intellectual esoterica, while also funneling them into economic precarity… sounds like a recipe for delicious brownies trouble.
Or, since we already know that it’s insipid fashtech with the cortical impact of moonshine, we could… not do that. Instead of wasting carbon on a joke about failing to synthesize a joke, maybe pet a cat? Drink a hot cocoa? Sing along to the "oh oh oh"s in “Sweet Caroline”?