Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025 was “slop,” the catch-all term for machine-generated crapola—or, as Merriam-Webster more prosaically (and politely) defines it, “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Hard to argue with the pick: As PC Gamer’s Lincoln Carpenter said, it was “a year full of AI humiliation” that started with a stupid AI-generated Star Wars video and didn’t stop until the calendar ran out.But while “slop” is without doubt an appropriately defining word for 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says it’s time to stop talking about it, because we need to move on to bigger and more important things—like how they’re going to make this obscenely expensive and resource-sucking mistake generator that nobody wants actually work.”We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion,” Nadella wrote on his sn scratchpad blog (via The Verge). “We are beginning to distinguish between ‘spectacle’ and ‘substance’. 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.”Nadella listed three key points the AI industry needs to focus on going forward, the first of which is developing a “new concept” of AI that builds upon the “bicycles for the mind” theory put forth by Steve Jobs in the early days of personal computing.”What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose…
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