On Slop

The Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2025 is "slop". As they say:

"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."

Jason Crawford, though, recently published a piece called "In Defense of Slop" where he doesn't say slop is good per se, but he does say it is a sign of something good happening - lowered barriers to creation, the removal of gatekeepers, freedom from the tyranny of finance, and more. Please read his entire linked article before engaging with the researcher agent. Here is an excerpt:

"The Internet lowered the cost of publishing to virtually zero, which enabled many low-quality blogs and other web sites. Social media made it trivial to put thoughts online, and made it much easier to find an audience, which enabled a vast amount more low-effort and low-quality posting. Now AI is arriving, and lowering the costs of creation itself, not just publication and audience-building. And it is enabling new and different forms of slop.

• More experimentation. It can be hard to predict how good or great a piece of writing, art, music or video is going to be. Major Hollywood pictures can be disliked by audiences, critics, or both; books often fail to make money or even pay out their advances. Conversely, sometimes an unknown creator comes out with a work that is initially ignored but goes on to fame and/or fortune. Lowering the bar for creation allows for more experiments, more chances to create something high-quality.
• Removal of the gatekeepers. If it’s hard to predict or evaluate what is good, who decides? Editors, producers, etc., who act as gatekeepers to the means of production and distribution. But gatekeepers are imperfect predictors, and they have blind spots. Harry Potter was rejected by twelve publishers before finding one that would take it: how many potentially great books never found that one editor to champion them, and never saw the light of day? Today there are far fewer gatekeepers for writing or podcasting, but they still exist in music and movies; AI will gradually remove these.
• More chance for people to make a start. E.g., there are many good bloggers who never would have gotten started if they had to first find a job as a journalist.
• More runway for works to find their audience. My writing had about 50 subscribers for the first two and a half years (now well over 50,000). Dwarkesh Patel was “was 2 months away from quitting the podcast for 2 years” before becoming a rocket-ship success. Lowering the cost of production allows these experiments to be incubated for years, kept alive by love and sweat, until they evolve into a more valuable form or catch their break.
• More content for niche audiences. When content is expensive, it has to serve a large audience, and everything converges on bland mainstream taste. When the only significant cost is one creator’s time, it only has to find 1,000 True Fans, and there is much more room for a broad and varied menu to serve many different palates.
• More diversity of content and format. When content is expensive, and gate-kept, it becomes the work of Trained Professionals, who are Serious People, and it should follow Formal Conventions. No serious magazine editor would approve a column that ranges widely across psychiatry, philosophy, politics, science, and epistemology, covering everything from book reviews to academic papers to online controversies. But that’s Scott Alexander, and he’s one of the best and most successful writers of our generation.
• Freedom from the tyranny of finance. When content is expensive, it becomes the domain of large corporations, who have a duty to their shareholders and who frequently succumb to the ruthless logic of financial returns. Hollywood today has found the safest returns in sequels, remakes, and the endless continuation of franchises such as Star Wars or the MCU. Low costs give you more ability to work for the love of the craft and for the sake of the art.

"Slop is a byproduct of this overall process, the detritus that accompanies greatly expanded production. Slop is at best annoying and frustrating, and at worst a tool for scams or propaganda. But the overall process will, I believe, usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation."