AI Slop—How Every Media Revolution Breeds Rubbish and Art

The Garbage Cycle: How Every Media Revolution Creates Garbage and Art

TO Denis Ellis Bechard edited by Clara Moskowitz

Spam, fluff, clickbait, nonsense, kitsch – all these are ways to describe mass-produced low-quality content. The latter term is reserved for the newest variety descended from artificial intelligence. While references to AI scum date back to at least 2022, a poet and technologist writing under the name “deepfates” popularized it two years later as “a term for objectionable AI-generated content.” in a post on X. Shortly after, developer Simon Willison shared the concept in blog post: “Not all AI-generated content sucks,” he wrote. “But if it's thoughtlessly created and forced upon someone who didn't ask for it, then slop is the perfect term.” Today, derogatory slurs are increasingly directed at all things AI, viewing it as an undeniable cultural polluter. And most of them are, but by rejecting them all indiscriminately we risk missing out on the minority of creations that are guardians.

Mass production culture has a long and complicated history. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes, believed to have been written between 300 and 200 BC. BC e., laments: “There is no end to the creation of many books.” This was a response to the flow of philosophical writings in the ancient Near East and Hellenistic world. Ever since new communication tools became available, someone would flood the area with the fastest, most imitative material that could grab attention. But over the years, some of this sediment has given birth to new forms of art, and trash and treasure have become one and the same.

One notable moment occurred after Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing machine in Europe. The device—the ChatGPT of the 1450s—allowed for the mass production of cheap printed materials. Over the next 300 years, pamphlets and ballads became a mainstay in Britain. Bringing news, satire and stories to places where expensive books rarely reached, they were sold for pennies, pinned to the walls of pubs and sung loudly to the illiterate. Some of this material was nonsense, of course, but much of it entertained and educated the masses. This also inspired authors from William Shakespeare Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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In the early 1700s, a growing reading public and coffeehouse chains created a steady demand for texts, giving rise to Grub Street, the slop generator of its day. This name belonged to an area of ​​London with printing houses, booksellers and cheap apartments, where impoverished writers churned out pamphlets, satires, political treatises, sensational stories and hack journalism– everything that is for sale. Samuel Johnson, 1755. dictionary did “Grubstreetsynonymous with the word “medium production”. Elites fueled a familiar moral panic about how commerce was ruining writing and ridiculed Grub Street as its writers created the first modern freelance economy and mass print culture. Johnson himself initially made his living in the Grub Street milieu, while other luminaries such as Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood and Jonathan Swift wrote for the growing market.

The 20th century film boom followed a similar pattern. By 1908, approximately 8,000 nickelodeons—five-cent movie theaters—produced non-stop performances. The production demands generated a lot of junk, but these efforts also helped develop the film industry's infrastructure while spreading awareness and helping newly arrived immigrants learn English. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, B-movie studios released films while producing directors and actors who changed Hollywood, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro.

In all of these situations, the goal was not to create masterpieces; it had to be created quickly and cheaply. But producing new kinds of slop expands the possibilities, allowing more people to participate—just as the Internet and social media have given rise not only to slop, but also to new kinds of creators. Perhaps because much of popular culture has been forgotten, original works stand out even more clearly from the monotony, and audiences begin to demand more from them.

The current wave of AI-generated slop raises the stakes because the costs for those creating them have fallen to almost zero, while the costs for others are high in terms of cognitive burden—doubting what we see and meeting demands on our attention—not to mention the environmental costs of heavy computing. The onslaught of mass content urgently demands that we highlight and celebrate what stands out so that we can better discourage what doesn't. The word “slop” helps us with this if used correctly.

Willison and Deepfates were careful to clarify that not all AI content sucks. Many human-controlled AI creations are original, surprising, and impressive. Some of them are exhibited in museums. Calling everything useless is a misguided attempt to stop the flood rather than to direct it in the right direction.

If “culture is a common occurrence in every society and in every mind,” as the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote in 1958, ordinary large-scale production will always involve waste. next thing we decide to leave.

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