AI Slop: Breaking Down This 2025 Buzzword and Why It’s Harmful

For 2025, Merriam-Website’s 2025 world of the year was slop.

Yup, you heard that right. Slop.

And in large part, the dictionary chose the word because of the rise of AI. With AI platforms becoming more popular, there’s more “slop” out there — lackluster content, off-kilter advertising images, and poorly-written books come to mind.

Slop has become a popular term for categorizing the poor outputs of AI. You may have even heard people saying the term “AI slop.” 

But what exactly is it, and why is it bad? 

What is AI slop?

AI slop is low-effort, mass-produced content that is created primarily to help businesses rank in search results or to scale their content efforts.

Why AI slop has become such a buzzword (and problematic)

AI slop has become a big buzzword because of the rise in use of platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. As people started using these platforms more, they discovered that it could easily and quickly generate entire blog posts within seconds.

That led to a movement of people leveraging AI to mass-produce content.

So, what’s the issue?

Here are some of the biggest problems with this:

1. Companies tend to not review the content that AI puts out. There’s a chance that the information is incorrect or hallucinated as a result. Now, add on to the fact that companies are mass-producing this content, and you have a problem.
2. The content tends to lack any brand personality. People will just take the content at face value without integrating their brand’s tone of voice, which makes it sound robotic and inauthentic. It makes it harder to connect with your brand.
3. AI can’t generate new ideas. The content it produces is regurgitated thoughts that already exist on the Internet. As a result, your content tends to blend in with every other piece that’s ranking and doesn’t have any unique aspects that help it stand out from competitors. 

Qualities of AI slop

What characteristics define AI slop? Here are a few things you can look for: 

1. Vague, generalized content

A hallmark of AI slop is that it’s very vague and general. The information included is often information you can find anywhere and doesn’t really bring any new perspectives to the table. It also doesn’t tend to go in depth and stays surface level.

As a result, the content is very generic and unhelpful to readers.

2. Repetitive structuring and phrasing

AI slop content is repetitive with its structuring and phrasing. It often follows a pattern, which is part of what makes it feel so robotic. 

With AI slop, the structure is often very rhythmic and doesn’t change structure. It also tends to use predictable patterns. For example, you might see that every section has a bulleted list or all of the sentences are about the same length.

AI slop doesn’t have style and nuance to it — it’s structured and pattern-oriented.

3. Neutral tone

AI slop content tends to be neutral. It doesn’t really take a side or have impassioned feelings about a certain topic. 

It generally has more of a corporate-type tone that doesn’t take sides or have any sort of strong opinions. It’s typically very cautiously written, and therefore not overly negative or positive towards any side.

4. Lack of original insight

As mentioned previously, AI can’t generate new thoughts or insights. It just regurgitates information that already exists on the web. Because of that, AI slop tends to lack any original perspectives or insights about a topic.

Those original insights and opinions are what make your content so unique and help you stand out from the competition. But when you have AI slop, your content becomes just like everything else on the web.

Why AI slop is detrimental to businesses

Having AI slop for content isn’t helpful to your business for multiple reasons:

1. It doesn’t help you get cited or mentioned

Here’s the thing: Because so many people know you can use AI to generate content, everyone is doing it. And because everyone is doing it, all the content sounds exactly the same.

But AI engines, like ChatGPT, and traditional engines, like Google, want to deliver unique, human-first content to users. So if your content is AI slop that sounds just like every other page on the topic, what incentive is there to cite you over anyone else?

The answer is none.

While AI slop is quick and east to generate, it won’t earn you the citations and visibility you’re looking for.

2. It makes it harder to connect with your brand

People are sick of corporations that are stoic and boring. They’re turning to brands that make them feel connected and seen. 

Look at brands like Wendy’s, Dove, and Nike. They have strong “personalities” that people genuinely connect with. Wendy’s is known for its sassy humor, Dove is an authenticity advocate, and Nike focuses on empowerment.

Those are all emotions they convey through their content, advertising, and other marketing materials.

All of that gets lost with AI slop. It’s just generic content with no conviction or personality.

3. It’s forgettable

The goal with your marketing is to create something that’s memorable and meaningful. You want people to remember the content they read from you and turn back to your brand when they’re ready to make a decision.

The problem is that AI slop content is forgettable.

It’s generic and doesn’t typically include any examples that help readers connect to the information. As a result, readers won’t remember it and won’t remember your brand either.

4. It can lead to Google penalties

Let’s be clear: Google isn’t against you using AI to help create content, as long as that content is helpful. The problem is that many businesses use AI to scale content creation and make a bunch of flat, unhelpful content.

Taking that approach could get you in deep trouble with Google because it could violate Google’s scaled content abuse policy.

As Google states, “Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users” is a violation of the policy. Therefore, you could get penalized by Google and excluded from appearing in search results.

So, if you want to avoid search penalties, avoid AI slop.

From AI slop to AI caviar: How you can use AI to make good content

The moral of this story isn’t that you can’t use AI to generate content. It’s moreso that you can’t leave AI to its own devices to put out flat, generalized, and boring content. So instead of putting out AI slop, let’s focus on how you can create caviar-level content with AI.

Here are some ways to use AI to avoid slop and make better content:

1. Be as specific as possible

Specificity is the key to success and avoiding AI slop content. AI slop often stems from people being lazy and just saying, “Make me a blog post about XYZ.” It gives AI no direction on where to start or what to include.

As a result, you get really generic copy that doesn’t engage or resonate with your audience.

You can turn that AI slop into AI caviar by being as specific as possible when asking AI platforms to complete tasks for you. 

That means you need to think through exactly what you want the AI to accomplish for you.

Instead of saying, “Write a blog post about financial portfolios,” be more specific by saying something like “Write a blog post about how to create a financial portfolio if you’re a young investor that has no investment experience. Make sure to provide information about diversification, investment level, and risk levels.”

The more specific you get with what you’re asking it to do, the better outcome you’ll have.

2. Feed it your brand voice

If you want to keep your content from sounding bland, give AI a hand — feed it notes and information about your brand voice. 

You can create a brand guide that highlights your brand’s voice, tone, and positioning. Give it examples of content you’ve created to help it emulate your style and way of conveying ideas.

On top of that, you can also prompt AI to put themselves in your shoes. You can say things like “Imagine you’re a mid-level marketing manager that’s doing XYZ…” to enable the AI platform to better understand the angle and framing.

By giving AI insight into your brand voice, it can help keep your content from sounding robotic and help it sound more like your brand.

3. Spend time structuring the right prompts

Prompting is a key component to your success with AI engines and the content it puts out. The more guidance and instructions you give AI, the better responses it produces. It also ensures that what it produces is more aligned with what you want.

The most efficient approach is to spend time generating reusable, detailed prompts. How those prompts look depends upon what you want AI to achieve.

You’ll want to include details about the goals for the content, what details you need included, and more. You can also include constraints to help keep AI aligned with the type of content you’re looking for.

4. Always have human oversight

If you’re opting to use AI to create content, you need human oversight no matter what. You can’t completely eliminate the human aspect because you need to fact-check everything and make sure it sounds correct.

AI is far from perfect and will make mistakes. It may hallucinate or misunderstand what you’re asking it to do. You can’t take it at face value — you need to have someone reviewing it to ensure accuracy.

Don’t settle for AI slop — get expertly crafted content that resonates

Don’t have the time to dedicate to getting your prompting right? Struggling to get quality output from AI? The expert team behind SEO.com, WebFX, can help you craft compelling content that resonates with your target audience.

From short blog posts to product descriptions to long-form articles, we can help you fill your website with content that wows your audience.

Connect with us today to learn more about our content services!