Slop.

I remember the first time I worked in an office with slack, and there was a bot that let you search for animated gif replies that it would expand in line in the chat. I'm an elder millennial, so this became the primary way I communicated. It was so much easier than pulling up Google image search and pasting a link every time I needed to express frustration by posting a gif of a panda breaking a keyboard. When Something good happened I send some sort of success gif. If something surprising happened, dramatic Beaver. If someone was expressing depression or loneliness, sad Keanu time.

Searching a database of reaction gifs is not art. It's expression, it's communication, but it's not really art. This person is expressing themselves, which is why I think they get so offended at having the output described as slop. But while it's communication, it is obviously not generating something new. There is a creative element, but creation implies transformation, turning a blank page into a drawing. There's no transformation happening in this picture. Just hundreds of elements being rearranged by an algorithm.

I would argue it's theoretically possible to generate actual art with the help of generative AI. I'm not sure how much of it I've seen, And I may be wrong.

But we don't call things like this Slop, just because they were generated with the help of AI. We call them slop, because thousands of actual pieces of art were blended together and homogenized, extruded through a filter, and then presented to us after someone put 2 minutes of thought into a line of text. It is as artistic as when I would post a gif of fireworks after someone said they successfully completed a task.

Martin Scorsese created a piece of art when he filmed The godfather. When I post a gif of Vito Corleone petting his cat, in response to someone asking me a favor, I am not creating art.