Rationalists often speculate about what might happen if a misaligned AI we created escapes containment. I think this has already happened. I claim the word “slop” is a misaligned AI we created that has escaped containment.

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976 to describe the unit of cultural evolution, in the same way genes are the unit of biological evolution. Every word is a raw unit of meaning people created to more efficiently lob compact meaning bombs at each other. People transmit, reproduce, and mutate them. Words are memes. Each word competes with other words for fitness and “wants” to perpetuate itself, in the same way we think of a gene as “wanting” to perpetuate itself despite its lack of agency.

So anthropomorphized, you can see that the word “slop” solves a variety of general problems. Its broad applicability contributes to its spread, and therefore fitness. And it learns from its environment and past actions — the way people use and spread the word “slop” depends on their cultural context and history. You wouldn’t casually sling the word “slop” around in a formal policy recommendation, or on a blog post you wrote three years ago. You might deploy it more readily today, now that it’s been awarded the prestigious Word of the Year 2025 award by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society.

If we think of the word “slop” as an AI, it’s clear that it is both misaligned and has escaped containment. The word “slop” was coined to describe unwanted, low-quality LLM output, a parallel to the word “spam” describing unwanted, low-quality emails. Widespread compounds like friendslop and slop bowl illustrate that the word’s meaning has drifted far indeed from its initial intention.

Photo of a Chipotle burrito bowl. The single-use, elliptical bowl contains chicken al pastor, corn, cheese, sour cream, lettuce, black beans, and cilantro lime white rice. Photo of a Chipotle burrito bowl. The single-use, elliptical bowl contains chicken al pastor, corn, cheese, sour cream, lettuce, black beans, and cilantro lime white rice.

Admittedly, categorizing the word “slop” as AI implies we should categorize all words as AIs, which doesn’t feel right. Let’s try a weaker version instead and see if that lands better. I claim the United States of America is a misaligned AGI we created that has escaped containment.

Yes, AGI. Even this devil’s advocate can’t find a framing that attributes human-level intelligence to the word “slop”. On the other hand, the US is at least as intelligent as a human, as well as being capable of nearly all common intellectual tasks.

In 2017, Charles Stross gave a keynote at the Chaos Communication Congress describing corporations as really old, really slow AIs. So we can start predicting what misaligned AGIs might do by looking at what misaligned corporations have already done. The argument goes, corporations are artificial: people created them. Corporations are the result of a series of inventions over time that gradually increased their capabilities. Corporations are intelligent: they are self-aware, learn from their actions and environment, and develop complex social relationships with other corporations. And corporations are agentic. Microsoft doesn’t do what Bill Gates wants. Or Steve Ballmer, or Satya Nadella, or any specific person. No person can direct all of Microsoft’s attention. Microsoft is composed of departments and people, just as people are composed of organs and cells. But Microsoft is something more than its constituent people, just as you are something more than your constituent cells. Microsoft’s will affects the world every day, in more ways than any one person can comprehend.

What Microsoft does not have is an army and a navy. The United States has those things. Like Microsoft, it is artificial, intelligent, and agentic. We the people created the US. Its existence depends on concepts that did not exist just 400 years ago. The US is aware of its own existence, learns from its actions, and has complex foreign relations with other nations. It has an immune system that isolates and kills cancerous people before they grow and hurt their surrounding people. Its will is different from and greater than any one person’s. Not even Donald Trump can direct all of the US’s attention. The US takes actions guided by a defined set of amendable principles, and it may later regret and apologize for its past actions.

It’s straightforward to show that the US is misaligned and has escaped containment. Even early in its history, the US displayed a strong desire to grow unchecked and to make more of itself. US ideals and culture outcompeted many others, spreading all over the world. Nearly half the world’s population now lives under a democracy. We can also point to actions the US takes that seem to violate its guiding principles. A cop in isolation can’t incarcerate a dissident; the US does. A sniper in isolation can’t assassinate Ali Khamenei; the US did.

Yet despite everything, I am still proud to be an American. Today I turn my own attention to shifting the US’s attention one tiny bit. I do this through the time-honored American tradition of indiscriminately lobbing compact meaning bombs everywhere.

Misaligned, uncontained AGIs are all around us. This has been true for over a hundred years. But humans are still alive and well. What are some of the things we did and still do to make this outcome, and good outcomes in general, more likely?