Satya Nadella wants the internet to keep an open mind about AI. The internet isn’t having it

A new insult for artificial intelligence just dropped thanks to Microsoft’s CEO. 

If you use Microsoft products, it’s near impossible to avoid AI now. The company is pushing AI agents deep into Windows, with every app, service, and product Microsoft has on the market now including some kind of AI integration, without the option to opt out. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently shared a blog post to LinkedIn titled “Looking Ahead to 2026” offering an insight into the company’s focus for the new year. Spoiler alert: it’s AI. 

Nadella wrote that he wants users to stop thinking of AI as “slop” and start thinking of it as “bicycles for the mind.” Many took the post as a pushback against the popular insult “slop” often leveled at anything AI-generated, recently crowned Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025. 

The internet saw Nadella’s critique and raised him a new insult for anything AI, now dubbed “Microslop.” 

“I will hereby be referring to Microsoft as MicroSlop for the rest of 2026,” one X user posted in response to Nadella’s words. The post currently has almost 200,000 views. 

The term subsequently trended across Instagram, Reddit, X and beyond. On X, @MrEwanMorrison wrote, “A great example of the ‘Streisand Effect’ – in which telling people not to call AI ‘slop’ is already backfiring and resulting in millions of people hearing the word for the first time and spreading it virally. A huge own goal from Microslop.”

“Year of the Linux desktop,” another X user posted. “but not because of Linux.”

In a separate clip uploaded over the weekend, programmer Ryan Fleury demonstrates Microslop in action. At the start of the video, the settings page AI-powered search bar for Windows 11 recommends searching “My mouse pointer is too small.” 

Yet, when Fleury searches “My mouse pointer is too small,” word for word, nothing turns up. He waits around for a moment or two, but nothing loads. But when he looks up “test” afterwards, three results pop up. “This is not a real company,” Fleury wrote.

He then added: “AI writes 90% of our code!!!!,” referring to claims made by Nadella that as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by artificial intelligence.

“Don’t worry, we can tell.”