A defense of AI art

AI Slop is Killing Online Communities

Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.

An Elegant Solution to AI Slop: Tax It, and Use the Resulting Billions of Dollars to Fund Cultural Institutions, Artists, and Researchers

A technologist proposes slapping a "slop tax" on companies that use or create generative AI content.

Is AI the greatest art heist in history?

New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it

I love AI, but it still can't design for shit

Without a critical human eye, AI produces slop. The quality bar is yours to maintain.

Is AI ruining… fashion?

There are compelling reasons to believe that slop is no longer just limited to the internet. From AI design tools to trend scraping and fast fashion… This video makes a compelling argument that AI plays a role in why so few fashion brands have unique identities anymore. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaxXspZQYkc]

Beyond Slop

Visions for humane creative AI tools based on craft, process, and emergence.

The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact

Platforms are finally recognizing that people don’t want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content.

AI's aesthetics of failure

On the demise of Sora and our enduring revulsion to AI slop

AI Slop Is Ruining Cute Animals on the Internet

Pet owners, rescue agencies, and wildlife groups are calling for new safeguards as AI makes it harder to tell whether animals, from polar bears to house cats, are real or fake.

choosing friction

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone

Reddit is considered one of the most human spaces left on the internet, but mods and users are overwhelmed with slop posts in the most popular subreddits.

​A Strategy for Protecting Content from AI

Because that’s the world we live in these days.

Rude Slop Behaviour

This essay aims to introduce social stigma around certain types of AI use, or at the very least, reduce the amount of slop I receive. What is slop? I like the deepfates definition: Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the

Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing

The artists talk process, slop, and why optimism and pessimism don’t quite cover it.