The Language War Against AI
This week, Macquarie Dictionary named ‘AI slop’ its word of the year for 2025, highlighting the extent to which artificial intelligence has already permeated the cultural sphere and the linguistic challenges that lie ahead.
AI has taken exponential leaps forward in the past five years, heralding a new age of information technology that surpasses all those preceding it. And like with all great technological innovations, it comes with a new set of challenges that alter our understanding of the world.
Each new age of technology in encumbered with its own inherent problems: the Iron Age wrought stronger weapons, clearing the way for colonial conquest; the Industrial Revolution and automated production threatened the livelihoods of factory workers; the Atomic Age bred fear of nuclear annihilation.
The Computer Age and the invention of microchips gave rise to hacking and cyber-attacks that have become one of the key concerns to global security. With the introduction of the internet, misinformation traditional circulated in fringe was allowed to infect mainstream public discourse and spread through the advent of social media, unfettered and for the most part, unfiltered.
With access to an online global database of information, we have already rescinded our faculties to analyse, store, and recall knowledge that in previous generations would be considered common. We’ve quickly developed an over-dependence on technology to answer our queries and solve our problems.
Each subsequent age has presented increasingly difficult problems to overcome, but the threats have been predominantly physical. What differentiates the age of artificial intelligence from its predecessors is the imminent danger it poses to our human intellect, especially when it comes to language.
Macquarie Dictionary naming ‘AI slop’ as its word of the year elucidates the unabated unravelling of the modern English language, largely owing to viral threads and trends propagated by the rise of short-form social media outlets such as TikTok.
The Macquarie Dictionary shortlist for 2025 word of the year includes terms like blind box, Ozempic face, bird-dogging, and the infamous Six-Seven. A look at the shortlist for Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year – aura farming, bio hack and rage bait – paints a similar picture of popular culture influencing the lexicon.
In any other era or generation, the words are largely gibberish, better suited for science fiction or the funny pages. But now that science fiction has become fact, the lines of language have been irreparably blurred.
Why Does It Matter?
It matters because language underpins our fundamental understanding of the world. Our collective human intelligence consists of words and numbers, providing a framework to communicate with one another and share ideas. Long before we could write, we spoke and told stories. Entire histories were transmitted orally and passed on from generation to generation, some surviving to this day.
Evolution of written language allowed for those histories to be recorded for posterity – volumes of writings that encompass all of human knowledge expressed through poetry, philosophy, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, theology, song, and story – every living thing under the sun.
Modern English is a living language in that it is always evolving. Though there are set rules governing its structure, there is always an exception. Owing to its roots as a hybrid language borrowing from Latin, Greek, West Germanic, and Celtic among others, modern English has become a pastiche of influences. This makes it malleable in terms of grammar, spelling, and vocabulary, unlike French, for example, which is strictly governed by the Académie Française.
The linguistic flexibility of English allows for new words, even nonsensical ones, to become formally recognised. Another word that’s entered our vocabulary courtesy of social media is ‘brainrot’, low quality digital content with no substance, which was named Oxford University Press’ word of the year in 2024.
Brainrot as been attributed to significant mental deterioration, especially for young people whose brains are still developing. The rise of brainrot presents another challenge for educators, with many noting the impact it has had on their students’ comprehension, emotional regulation, and attention spans.
Despite Australia having overall high literacy rates, at least one third of Australian children cannot read at a proficient level for their age, while 44% of adults have low to very low literacy. This is coupled with a downward global trend in young people’s engagement with reading. They are no longer learning language from writers, but from online creators spewing meaningless phrases for internet clout.
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Whether we like it or not, AI is the next chapter of human technological development, and we’re already too far into the story to stop turning the pages. We are living in the future envisioned by countless science fiction writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, witnessing the birth of artificial intelligence and all the potential it holds.
But instead of using it to enrich our lives, we generate videos of cats playing guitar and Hitler dancing to Kanye West, along with deepfakes of dead celebrities, political propaganda, and a phenomenal amount of pornography with highly dubious subject matter that would make most R34 artists question their life choices.
Meanwhile the military-industrial complex is busily figuring out how create a race of AI-powered killing machines to replace ground troops, and savvy tech innovators have already deployed a full range of AI sex dolls to the international market designed to look like minors. For all the honourable achievements we’ve accomplished in the field of artificial intelligence, profit, power, and sex remain the primary motivators in human development.
From the way we speak to the way in which we interpret and understand the world around us, AI slop threatens the established perception of reality and indeed the moral fabric of society, tenuous as it is. Never before have we needed to scrutinise every single piece of content to such a degree and there is no longer any face value to any information we are presented.
In that world, objective truth is eroded, and knowledge becomes guided by personal belief systems with no factual validity. Throughout history, such circumstances have only led to oppression and destruction, a shortcut to totalitarianism.
Only this time, we are the ones dictating our own demise through apathy and an aversion to intellectual inquiry, preferring to be satiated and numbed by a drip-feed of dopamine. Caged like a junkie with a never-ending supply, wallowing in their own crapulence as they slowly wither and eventually succumb to being consumed.
We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been. Perhaps the novelty of AI slop will shortly wear thin, like every other obnoxious social media trend we’re forced to endure. But the damage has already been done and is likely to get worse before it gets any better, human nature being any indicator. We are in a battle for truth, knowledge, and grammatical accuracy, and AI slop is the enemy.
