Apparently, “slop” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year – as determined by the organisation’s “human editors”, it specified in a blog post prior to Christmas.
While we feel the word has lost a lot of meaning due to its undeniable overuse throughout 2025, said fleshy beings defined it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence”. Seems relatively accurate to us.
Satya Nadella, whose Microsoft company has poured tens of billions of dollars into the technology, doesn’t like the insult, though.
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He wrote in an SN Scratchpad post ahead of the New Year:
“We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our 'theory of the mind' that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer.”
We’ve read Nadella’s post through several times now, and we’re honestly struggling to extract much meaning from the corpobabble it’s undeniably stuffed full of. We can’t help but wonder whether he employed Copilot to help author it.
But we think he sums it all up with this sentence: “We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed, but also the harder and more important question of how to shape its impact on the world.”
In other words, the tech is here but no one’s really figured out how to best use it yet. Or, in Microsoft’s case, how to best sell it.
Like it or loathe it, AI is going to dominate discussion in the games industry this year.
We’ve already seen studios like Larian come out and admit they’re exploring the possibilities of the technology, and they won’t be alone. Meanwhile, teams like Sandfall Interactive have said they’ll never use it again, after attracting some criticism for including some generated art assets in undisputed Game of the Year winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
We can’t see any immediate resolution to the issues: with generative AI largely trained upon the individual endeavour of humans, questions of ethics will continue to be raised.
And moreover, the technology’s impact on the environment – and, increasingly, economy – will remain big talking points.
For Nadella and Microsoft, who’s seemingly bet everything on generative AI, this year may yet prove a make or break moment.