2025's Words of the Year, so far

cougr

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Oxford Dictionary: rage bait
online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content

Macquarie Dictionary: AI slop
low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user

The Cambridge Dictionary: parasocial
involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence

Collins Dictionary: vibe coding
the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.” As a blog post further describes it: “Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself

Dictionary.com: 67
(pronounced “six-seven,” not “sixty-seven”)

(Its) exact meaning is elusive. “It’s complicated,” says Dictionary.com. “Some say it means ‘so-so,’ or ‘maybe this, maybe that,’ especially when paired with its signature hand gesture where both palms face up and move alternately up and down.” It added there was a bit of teasing undertone to it: “Some youngsters, sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders, will use it to stand in for a reply to just about any question.”
 
Εγώ σκεφτόμουν να διαλέξουμε το enshittification για τρίτη χρονιά, αλλά θα βολευτώ με το AI slop (παρότι είμαι φίλος της ΤΝ, μην παρεξηγηθώ).
 
Εγώ σκεφτόμουν να διαλέξουμε το enshittification για τρίτη χρονιά, αλλά θα βολευτώ με το AI slop (παρότι είμαι φίλος της ΤΝ, μην παρεξηγηθώ).
Και έρχεται ο Economist να με δικαιώσει: The Economist’s word of the year for 2025 is… slop.
...
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?
 
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