There is starting to be some genuinely interesting AI-created film stuff (among a flood of slop), and I suspect this will only accelerate. The “is it art?” debate will grow Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” already argued it’s likely the wrong question.
Sep 19, 2026 at 1:42 PM
Is AI the greatest art heist in history?
New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it
The cinematograph, the "noematograph," and the future of AI art
From the cinematograph to the "noematograph," the Hugh-winning author explores how technology has, and may still, breed new artistic forms.
The Power of Art in the AI Age
On 21st-Century Painting and the Backlash Against the Thinking Machines
The Omg Lol Times · We have to talk about AI “art”
Note: In this post I’m going to use the term “AI” as a lazy shorthand for “generative content creation via large-scale pre-trained models” because time is tight and I’ve got arthritis. I know it’s not really “AI”, but please, let me give my typing fingers a break here.
A defense of AI art
It's not just slop, it's not stolen, it's not bad for the environment, and we should want art to be easy to make
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.
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’s Jurassic Park Moment
Something incredible is happening in AI right now, and it's not entirely to the good. Everybody is talking about systems like chatGPT (OpenAI), Dall-E 2, and Lensa that generate text and images that look remarkably human-like, with astonishingly little effort.
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.
Algorithmic Underground
I have been thinking about something Jean Baudrillard said a lot recently. It comes to mind because of the current moment and what is happening around generative AI. He said, "Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much."
AI, Artifice, And Authenticity
The era of badly-automated homogenized engagement slop is upon us. I desperately want to believe there's a renaissance for authenticity on the other end.
Will AI spark a scientific renaissance — or a diffuse monoculture?
Artificial intelligence’s ability to enrich science will depend not only on model capability, but also on whether researchers, reviewers and funders reward originality over speed.
AI video is moving beyond clip slop
AI companies don’t just want Hollywood using AI for video, but for everything.
read the article making this argument and it just reinforced the 3d printing analogy. the industry hype with AI is 100x larger, but the pattern was a similar "this is going to change humanity" to "this is going to revolutionize specific industries" to "this will be a fun hobby for eccentrics"
Adam Conover
I’m sorry but “everyone is going to use AI to code their own apps” sounds like “everyone is going to learn HTML and code their own websites.“ like … have you met people? no they’re not
