I have always loved a good neologism. Properly defined, a neologism is a new word or expression, or a new meaning attached to an existing one. I prefer to think of it as language catching up with reality.
Naturally, one of my favourite examples comes from The Simpsons. In a 1996 episode, Edna Krabappel asks:
Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
Miss Hoover replies:
I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Both words have since escaped Springfield and entered the dictionary. Embiggen means to make something bigger or more expansive. Cromulent means acceptable or satisfactory. What began as a joke became, quite literally, perfectly cromulent English.
Slop, and the next word after it
The internet has proved an efficient factory for new words of its own. Collins now recognises slop as low-quality content, particularly content generated using AI, while its new-word tracker is monitoring the fuller term AI slop. Merriam-Webster went further and selected slop as its 2025 Word of the Year, defining it around low-quality digital content produced at scale using artificial intelligence.
Slop is useful because it names a real phenomenon. It is also becoming a lazy accusation. Not everything produced with AI is slop, just as not everything written entirely by a human being is worth reading.
My bet for the next perfectly cromulent addition to the dictionary is slopulism.
A blend of slop and populism, it emerged to describe a kind of politics made for an algorithm, emotionally gratifying, rich in outrage and cultural shorthand, but weak on evidence, coherence or consequences. Typically, once examined by anyone informed (or even merely inclined to ask a second question), slopulist ideas prove to have no coherent or productive objective beyond provoking the reaction for which they were designed.
The term began in politics, but I doubt it will remain there. Businesses and startups especially can fall into the same trap: publishing because the calendar demands it, chasing a format because it is gaining traction and mistaking activity for strategy. Slopulism begins when producing content becomes an end in itself, detached from any clear objective, audience or consequence. The problem is not speed or volume, but the absence of judgment and control over what is being produced and why.
Nobody remembers the novelist who wrote the most books or the band that played the most notes; organisations should not expect content to work differently.
Two ironies
There are two ironies in all of this. The first is that AI, so often blamed for producing slop, can be used to do almost the opposite. Its real value is not simply that it can produce more words, but that it can make more of the information a company already holds usable: patterns buried across customer feedback, sales data, research, internal archives and years of conversations that no individual could reasonably hold in their head. Used properly, that becomes the raw material for original, data-led reports and evergreen stories. Rakuten, for example, is using AI to extract themes from large volumes of customer reviews and turn its wider data into market analysis and sales insights.
Anthropic makes the point particularly well. Its data-rich Economic Index reports surface patterns across vast amounts of usage data, while Dario Amodei's long-form essays, including Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology, place complex technological change within a wider human, political and social story and do so, at times, in genuinely lovely prose. Data can reveal the story, but it still takes skilled researchers and writers to decide what it means and make it memorable.
That leads to the second irony: the companies closest to AI are placing a growing premium on human storytelling. Sifted reported that demand for corporate "storytellers" had roughly doubled in a year, with companies including Google, Microsoft and Notion creating roles and structures around narrative. OpenAI's acquisition of TBPN was based explicitly on the show's editorial instincts, understanding of audiences and ability to convene influential voices. As machine-generated language becomes more abundant, the human ability to find the signal, exercise judgment and tell a story with purpose becomes more valuable, not less.
On a practical level good content is not only more memorable and purposeful; in an age of search and AI-generated answers, it is also more likely to remain discoverable, influential and useful long after publication.
Before you publish, ask
Before a business or organisation creates another piece of content, it should stop and answer a harder set of questions. The content calendar is not the strategy, and publication is not the objective. Intentionality comes first.
- What is the objective? What should be different because this exists, not simply what do we want to produce?
- Who is the audience? Who specifically needs to see it, what do they already believe and what do we want them to understand, feel or do next?
- What do we have to say that is genuinely ours? Is there an insight, experience, argument or body of evidence that another organisation could not credibly publish under its own name?
- What knowledge are we failing to use? Can AI help surface patterns from customer conversations, research, internal archives, sales data or institutional memory that would otherwise remain hidden?
- What is the right format? Does the idea require a report, an article, a briefing, a video, a podcast, a newsletter or something else entirely? The format should follow the audience and the objective, not the trend.
- Where should it live and how will it travel? Producing something is not the same as distributing it. Which channels, people and communities will give it relevance and reach?
- How does it fit the wider narrative? Stories do not disappear when the campaign ends. Does this reinforce what the organisation has said before, develop it or contradict it?
- What is the commitment? Do we have the expertise, time and attention to produce this properly and sustain the promised cadence?
- Who should do the work? Is the knowledge and craft available in-house, does it require an external specialist, or is the right answer a combination of both?
- Is it repeatable? Can the work become a series, an evolving dataset, an evergreen resource or a body of thinking that grows more valuable over time?
- Is it recursive? Can what we learn from the audience, the data and the response feed back into the next piece and improve the wider communications strategy?
If you can answer those questions honestly, you are far more likely to create content that resonates, is perfectly cromulent to its audience and, over time, embiggens your organisation's standing with the stakeholders who matter.
Useful recent reading
- "Trolling Democracy", The New York Times, 10 July 2025, is the early mainstream treatment of slopulism as politics created by and for social media.
- "Is 'Slopulism' Shaping Our Politics?", The New York Times, 13 February 2026, gives the clearest recent account of the term as online political performance that substitutes emotional gratification for concrete political substance.
- "Democrats Learned the Wrong Lesson From 2024", The Atlantic, 18 March 2026, shows how the term is already broadening beyond memes and posts to describe superficially attractive policies that collapse under examination.
- "The Adolescents Have Taken Over Policymaking", Josh Barro, 22 March 2026, applies it to policies sold through immediate emotional appeal without proper consideration of how they would work or whom they might harm.
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