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.
The Visibility Gap
The best AI applications tend to be invisible. They work behind the scenes, embedded in systems that users don't think about. When AI improves a smartphone camera or helps a warehouse optimize its inventory, nobody notices it's there.
The worst AI applications are unavoidable. They clog up search results, spam inboxes, and fill social media feeds with content that nobody asked for and nobody wants to read.
Nadella's challenge isn't technical. It's perceptual. How do you convince people that a technology is valuable when their most common experience with it is annoyance?
Microsoft's Stake in the Conversation
The company has invested billions in OpenAI and integrated AI tools across its product line. Nadella needs the public conversation about artificial intelligence to shift, because right now it's trending in a direction that makes his massive bet look questionable.
If AI becomes synonymous with slop in the public mind, that's a branding disaster. It doesn't matter how many useful applications exist if the dominant perception is that AI means low-quality garbage.
Microsoft isn't alone in this. Every major tech company has poured resources into AI development. They're all facing the same problem: the technology's most visible outputs are often its worst ones.
Can the Narrative Change?
Nadella's call for a different understanding of AI runs into a basic problem. You can't control what people pay attention to.
The medical imaging tool that helps diagnose cancer is important. It matters. But it's not something most people will ever interact with directly. The AI-generated article that wastes three minutes of their time? That's immediate. Personal. Irritating.
Changing the conversation might require changing what's visible. If AI companies want people to think differently about the technology, they need to make the good stuff as obvious as the bad stuff currently is.
Until then, Nadella can argue that we're focusing on the wrong things. But the slop isn't going anywhere. And neither is the frustration it creates.