Importance of Protecting Reliable Knowledge in Emergency Management: A Letter from the Editor

Abstract

About a month ago, Merriam-Webster’s editors chose “slop” as the word of the year. Defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” (2025) slop represents an inevitable outcome of the way that so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ makes it easy to produce raw volumes of content with little validation and verification, little context and respect for lived experience, and little accountability for the harms it does.