The folks at Merriam-Webster closed 2025 with a bang—announcing slop as the Word of the Year and the release of its first new hardback dictionary in more than twenty years. The standard-bearer of dictionary-making had chosen, in effect, to take a stand in the real world, while maintaining its digital presence. At kaleidaweb, we did the same, because Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, as its name implies, artificial, and incongruous to intellect.
Merriam-Webster defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
In 2025, we were inundated with the stuff, from silly videos of talking animals to fabricated videos, deepfakes, fake news, and books filled with synthetic fluff instead of substance. Thanks to what TechCrunch calls “this new breed of media generator,” such as Sora from OpenAI and Veo from Google Gemini, we now have in our midst “AI-generated books, podcasts, pop songs, TV commercials — even entire movies.”
According to reporter Lucas Ropek, who wrote the aforementioned TechCrunch article, a study from May 2025 concluded that “nearly 75% of all new web content from the previous month had involved some kind of AI.”
That’s absurd.
That’s alarming.
And by now you’re probably wondering where you, your business, and your content stand in this ocean of oozing slop.
While many in the sea of humanity rode the AI wave last year, one talking cat video at a time, the kaleidaweb team worked steadily to understand the potential dangers of AI not just on your data and intellectual property, but on society, the environment, and the future of human learning, among other topics. We determined that:
- Machines “learn” by gobbling up content created by humans. AI regurgitates that “knowledge” and gobbles more content, this time created by humans who potentially got their information from AI-generated media, with or without knowing it. If an error exists in this cycle of slop, it gets repeated ad infinitum.
- Once AI gets its teeth into your content, your work is no longer yours. Your intellectual property, content, and creations get digested; like a human body, it is used as fuel, only not at all on your behalf. It puts the products of your labor into the slop factory, from which more people and more machines feed. There is no guarantee that the context of your work will stay intact.
- AI is ruinous to the environment. AI data centers require immense plots of land, vast amounts of water, and pump pollutants back into the environment. Looting Earth’s natural resources to run machines imperils the species of plants and animals (including humans) that rely on them for basic survival. The continued proliferation of these data centers is tipping Earth ever more quickly toward climate catastrophe.
- Nefarious actors are now creating “ghost stores.” WIRED describes this turn as “an online scam whereby fake websites are created, claiming to sell high-quality products at significant discounts due to closing down.”
- AI is a bubble. Some economic scholars guarantee that it, like other tech-based bubbles, will burst. So far, it isn’t exactly paying off. Pinterest thought AI would “accelerate its fortunes,” but the company’s shares “tanked 20 percent in November after its third-quarter earnings and revenue outlook fell short of analysts’ expectations,” WIRED reported.
kaleidaweb has implemented the following measures to keep your website away from AI’s reach and to help you stand out from the endless stream of slop:
- We turn off or uninstall AI features on mission critical apps and software, if possible.
- If it’s not possible to turn off or uninstall these features, we simply ignore them and never use them.
- If AI is embedded to a degree that software or an app will not work without it, if a developer has forced AI upon its users, we stop using that software or app.
- kaleidaweb has established a firm “No AI Policy,” than bans AI from being used in any aspect of our work, whether on the code, build, design, and maintenance part of the business or in our auxiliary services, such as copywriting, graphic design, and editing.
- We automate routine maintenance work, such as nightly backups and scans, but using proven and tested methods (not AI suggestions) and software created by humans.
- Automated tasks are monitored by human oversight.
The proliferation of AI has been fast and vast. It literally is in everything, and increasingly difficult to get around. Calls to customer service are involved; contact with other tech heads who are devising AI-canceling code is now a part of the job. But these are the steps we are willing to take because kaleidaweb is not in the business of producing slop, and it remains our intention, in the New Year and beyond, to work with humans and help them grow their businesses.
“I’ll do my best personally and professionally to not empower billionaires and Big Tech,” Dani Shaw, kaleidaweb Founder/Lead Developer said. “There are alternatives to AI, as millions of human creatives and coders have used since the first stroke and byte.”
Further Reading:
- The Data Center Resistance Has Arrived
- Pinterest Users Are Tired of All the AI Slop
- Data Center Boom in Georgia Sparks Water Worries and Resident Backlash
- Georgia Residents Up in Arms Over Mega Data Center
- Merriam-Webster Goes Old School with First New Hardcover Collegiate Dictionary in 22 Years
- The Majority AI View
- AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All
- Indie Game Developers Have a New Sales Pitch: Being ‘AI Free’
- Policymakers Have to Prepare Now for When the AI Bubble Bursts
- First AI Cyberattack
- Here's Why Concerns About an AI Bubble Are Bigger Than Ever