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.

This one is just confusing, why are they Star Trek?

That it’s the typical pseudo-Ghibli style complete with piss filter ties it all together. They couldn’t even be arsed to ask the AI to make it in the style of one of the animated Star Trek shows. That level of not caring about the process is why people call it slop.

I think one aspect (out of many) that makes AI art so icky is the inherent insincerity of it. It imitates art that takes human artists dozens of hours to create and is appropriately appreciated by people, while itself only taking seconds to generate. AI artists want the same appreciation for their low-skill, low-effort slop as people who have honed their craft for decades and without whom their AIs wouldn't be able to function. Additionally AI art takes up so much raw space, any art platform that doesn't ban it gets absolutely flooded with low-effort assembly line garbage that often refuses to identify itself as such, hoping to trick people into thinking someone actually put work into it.

Art is not impressive if anyone can do it. A photo-realistic drawing is more impressive than a photo of the same thing, even though the latter might be "objectively" more detailed/accurate. I could create a Star Trek cartoon like that within an hour using GenAI, but creating the exact same thing by hand would take me years. AI artists however pretend like their low-effort slop has the same creative value as any hand-made art.

They want to only drink raw milk from a full pasture cow which never was closer than 50 km from a GMO plant, hand-milked by a barefoot busty illiterate teenager otherwise they think it's gay.

But Art^TM^ ? Oh yeah give me the american craft slices equivalent of it

This should be the dictionary definition of AI slop. Everything is wrong with this...I struggle to call it a picture, but I suppose it is.

Ah yes, the 1995 film Monsters Incorporated

Real Star Trek fans depict Worf as a barbarian. Totally in character for Worf.

Except none of those other things were ever called "Slop" like this, because the problem isn't that it is a new creative medium that challenges the old ones, but rather that it isn't a creative medium at all, as evidenced by this...thing. It's a meat grinder to turn actual art into slop for piggies with no standards, hence why the output is called "slop"

one of the funny aspects of AI content to me is how they're always like "Wow this technology democratizes art. Now we can all tell any story we want!!" and then 99% of the output is either

whining about people talking shit about GenAI like this,

rip offs of commercial films that the AI could use as the reference,

stuff that is straight just a pixar character or something looking at the camera going "I CREATED THIS WITH CLAUDE 4.59 ART IS FOR EVERYONE NOW!",

.... or.... cuck fantasies as apparently men are wont to do with any new technology they get their hands on.

But it's always one of the four lol

Sloppy Meta Slop Slop

Slop has been a word associated with AI, and iirc--before AI became mainstream--the word was used to describe games, software, and other creative works/products of labor that were churned out for the sake of profit, whether it was an indie dev developing 100s of crappy Steam Greenlight games that repeated the same formula of the same sloppily written codebase, or some capitalist hyperexploiting their workers to create rushed work that lacks any soul because of the intense alienation it was made under. I always felt "slop" existed, especially under capitalism, and because there's so much "slop" on the internet resulting from the push for quantity and speed over quality, AI will likely produce more slop because it reflects the majority of works that the system encouraged. In a sense, AI isn't artificial intelligence, but alienation imitation.

I'm not sure I am stating something that is obvious, noteworthy, or already discussed, but I haven't really seen it mentioned in this context almost anywhere online, and it's something that has been on my mind for a while.

i'm always in such an odd spot with this debate because i actually love procedural generation, particle effects, fractals, shit like that where, oh no, technically i'm just setting up a little bespoke machine that eventually produces the actual thing you see. half the time i'm doing the "was jackson polluck a painter" debate against myself, about myself

either way fuck these guys lol, i respect mspaint deviantart more than ai slop, it's got more humanity in it

The artistic equivalent of pink slime. Imagine if LLMs could print out food like substances. It would be so terrible, but I'm guessing if you just want sugary and salty food like objects to consume, it would be like a personalized treat dispenser. Your health would obviously deteriorate because of these worthless "meals".

Ah, yes. I clearly remember how Toy Story was critically panned as digital slop back upon it's 1995 release. Who would ever have thought it would go on to be culturally re-evaluated instead of fading into obscurity?

The right cant make real art, only AI slop