Satya Nadella has a problem with how we talk about AI.
The Microsoft CEO isn't thrilled with the growing consensus that artificial intelligence is primarily a machine for churning out what the internet has started calling "slop." Merriam-Webster made it official, naming the term its 2026 word of the year: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."
But Nadella thinks we're missing the point.
Speaking at a tech conference this week, he argued that focusing on AI's capacity to generate mediocre content obscures what the technology actually does well. "We're having the wrong conversation," he said. "It's like judging the printing press by looking at grocery store tabloids."
The Slop Problem Is Real
He's not wrong about the tabloids. Search results are increasingly littered with AI-generated articles that read like they were written by a student who skimmed the Wikipedia page five minutes before class. Recipe blogs now feature paragraphs of robotic prose before you get to the ingredients. Amazon reviews sound like they were composed by aliens who learned English from instruction manuals.
The "slop" designation reflects genuine frustration. People can tell when they're reading something that wasn't written by a human, even if they can't articulate exactly why. There's a flatness to it. A lack of personality. The digital equivalent of grocery store white bread.
Merriam-Webster's choice wasn't random. The word surged in searches throughout 2025 as users tried to describe the phenomenon of encountering obviously synthetic content everywhere they looked. Social media feeds. News aggregators. Even email newsletters.
What Nadella Wants You to See Instead
Microsoft's chief executive wants to redirect attention to what he calls AI's "practical applications"—the stuff that doesn't make headlines but changes how work gets done.
He points to AI systems that help radiologists spot tumors they might have missed. Software that translates technical documentation into dozens of languages overnight. Tools that let small businesses analyze customer data without hiring a team of analysts.
"Nobody writes a news story about an AI that helped a doctor save a life," Nadella said. "But they'll write ten stories about an AI that wrote a bad poem."
It's a fair point, though it ignores why the bad poems get attention. People encounter low-quality AI content constantly. They don't encounter the medical imaging tools.
