Newhouse School professor of advanced media Shelly Palmer explains how to navigate the everchanging world of AI by avoiding what is called "AI slop."

By focusing automation efforts on high-volume, low-variability tasks rather than attempting to automate judgment, companies capture AI's benefits while avoiding slop.

“Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything,” the dictionary writes, adding that, in an age of AI anxiety, it is a term designed to communicate “a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking” of the technology.

Merriam-Webster has selected "slop" for the dictionary company's 2025 word of the year. The leading lexicographers define slop as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.

SNL has joked about AI in sketches this year, including one in January starring Timothée Chalamet and Bowen Yang that poked fun at AI’s proclivity for producing images of people with extra fingers. And in a sketch last month, Glen Powell played a grandpa pictured in old photos brought to life in an AI app gone wrong.

To be clear: Disney is not handing the keys to its IP over to OpenAI indefinitely. In an interview with CNBC ’s “Squawk on the Street” Thursday, Disney CEO Bob Iger clarified that the three-year licensing deal comes with only about a year of exclusivity for OpenAI. After that, Disney can shop its IP to other AI companies.