Like any self-respecting nerd, I am a fan of Words of the Year (not to be confused with Letters of the Year, please), those annual selections that are often presented as cultural thermometers. Taken together, this year’s choices suggest something more troubling than a passing trend: they point to a crisis of meaning in the age of artificial intelligence. Let me explain.
Merriam-Webster chose slop. Dictionary.com went with 6.7. Cambridge selected parasocial. Collins opted for vibe coding. At first glance, these terms seem unrelated. Yet they all orbit the same phenomenon: a digital ecosystem that is saturated, accelerated, and increasingly emptied of meaning. A kind of disgust-system.
6.7, for instance, is almost an anti-word. It defines nothing. It is a shared signal with no stable content—language without anchorage, easily drifting from one semantic ocean to another. Communication that no longer requires meaning in order to circulate: a devalued currency.
Slop, by contrast, does have a definition—but it is an unsettling one: low-quality content produced at scale, often by artificial intelligence. Digital waste. Noise. Residue. And here something deeper emerges: the problem is not only that we consume slop, but that AI itself feeds on it. We build systems that generate content; that content pollutes the digital environment; and that same environment then becomes the material from which AI learns. A perfect circle of degradation: garbage in, garbage out.
This is not merely contamination of the digital landscape. It is contamination of thought, of language, of imagination. If the archive of the world fills with slop, what kinds of ideas can possibly emerge from it?
Parasocial points to another kind of void: one-sided relationships, affects without reciprocity, bonds with figures—or intelligences—that never look back. Recently, a woman in Japan married a character created by ChatGPT—an extreme example, perhaps, but one that illustrates how far this relational emptiness can go.
And vibe coding gestures toward a mode of creation in which understanding no longer matters—only the feeling that something works. Programming without knowing. Creating without comprehension. Operating without depth. Not long ago, I saw an advertisement for an app that lets you build applications simply by describing what you want. An idea—barely developed—moves directly from your mind into the digital world.
As an incurable optimist, I observe all this with unease. Taken together, these words offer a troubling diagnosis. They describe a moment in which we produce more language than ever, yet say less. In which we generate infinite texts, images, and code, while meaning becomes harder and harder to find.
Perhaps the real challenge is not to stop artificial intelligence (not happening, my friend—the AI train has already left the station), but to rescue meaning before noise becomes the only language we know.
