Merriam-Webster Picked 'Slop' as 2025's Word. Brands Should Worry

Visible AI in marketing is about four times more likely to cost a brand trust than to build it, according to research reported by eMarketer. That single figure landed in a breakout room last month, where a franchise conference audience got a live demonstration of why it holds.

An Entrepreneur contributor played three videos for a small group of brand leaders. The first was an AI-generated ad: a woman with perfect abs, a glowing bottle of juice, four flavor names and nothing else. The second was an AI avatar reciting a consulting firm's 18 years of experience. The third was a real franchisee — a woman who had left health care burned out and later kept her late husband's business running in his memory.

Asked how the first two felt, one man said: "It had no emotional impact on me at all." Asked who liked the third video, every hand in the room went up. One woman said she was smiling the whole time and could not explain why.

The gap between those reactions is where a brand's trust lives — and Merriam-Webster has now named a word for what fills it. The dictionary picked "slop" as its 2025 word of the year, a term for the flood of low-quality digital content AI produces.

Watching is not the same as trusting

You can now make a talking-head video in 20 seconds for the price of a monthly subscription. The mistake, the author argues, is confusing a view with belief.

Synthetic content also traps brands in a labeling dilemma. Disclose the AI, and viewers trust it less because it does not feel real. Hide it, and you look worse when they figure it out. Neither road leads to trust. The only way out is to stop needing the label.

So before anything goes live, the test should not be whether people will watch it. The test is whether they will believe it.

What does faking it actually cost?

About once a month, a brand tells the author's team its owners are too busy to be on camera, and someone proposes a fix: a neighbor or friend who plays a franchisee. His team says no and loses a few projects a year over it. His counterargument is blunt: a good interview takes about 17 minutes. If an owner cannot give 17 minutes, you have a different problem.

Staging a person is also legally risky:

• The FTC rule on fake reviews and testimonials covers AI-generated ones, with civil penalties running more than $53,000 per violation.
• The U.S. Copyright Office has concluded that purely AI-generated material is not protected by copyright — meaning you may not fully own the ad you prompted.

The author learned the legal lesson himself in 2019, filming his first franchise video. He had the franchisee look into the lens and say, "You could make millions." The CEO called him after the first draft: "Dude, we've got to talk." Franchise disclosure rules tightly limit earnings claims, and he had just put one in a franchisee's mouth. The line never made it past that draft. His rule now: run every testimonial past legal before it goes out.

Give every story an arc

Nobody would sit through 90 minutes of Liam Neeson talking at the camera. We watch because, eventually, he has to go fight somebody. The AI videos in the breakout room were a straight line; a real story has a setup, a struggle, a turning point and a resolution. For a business owner, that maps to life before, what was not working, the moment they decided to jump and what life looks like now.

That shape is also how people remember. Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, described an exercise where Stanford students gave short persuasive speeches. Afterward, 63% of listeners remembered the stories. Only 5% remembered a single statistic. Your webinar slides are the 5%.

A mother and son who owned a Mr. Rooter location once told the author's team: "We learned more going to training than we did going to college." A slide can say "comprehensive training" forever. That one sentence lands because someone who looks like the prospect said it.

Film what they tell you, not just the interview

The practical trick: talk with an owner for 15 minutes, write down the roughly 10 things they mention loving about their life and work, then go film them. If she loves dropping her kids off at school, be in the car the next morning. If he loves meeting customers, follow him to the job site. The author's team spends at least half of every shoot day outside headquarters.

Once, they cut real footage from a franchisee's military service into his video. When he watched it, he cried. He said he never thought he would be happy again after war, and now he gets to see his family more.

The author's closing prescription: use AI to speed up the work, from transcripts to finding the best take — never to fake the people whose lives actually changed. Pick one owner this week, ask for 17 minutes and three questions, then go film it. AI made content nearly free, which makes human proof the new luxury.