A work successfully “optimizing for mass consumption” will always provoke human response. AI shrimp Jesus and The Starry Night both emotionally resonated with millions of people. And yet Van Gogh would not go viral on TikTok, while shrimp Jesus would not be displayed in the Museum of Modern Art. This is because the world of high art retains a level... See more

This presents a pervasive issue in mass media: we consciously prefer content, but subconsciously prefer form—and our subconscious has priority. We interact with media in a flow state, naturally responding to affordances as they arise. This ease of action precedes active reflection, when we can evaluate the intellectual content of a message. If... See more

As such, slop is intended to optimize for mass consumption . The earliest AI-generated images we consider “slop” were engineered for Facebook virality: shrimp Jesus, cat videos, and pictures of disabled veterans were deliberately designed to generate engagement and reach a broad audience.2 Whether slop actually succeeds is irrelevant: the intent is... See more

Slop is form without content . A pig’s fodder is simply meant to be food , not a type of food that does something . Instagram slop, likewise, is simply meant to go viral. It is molded in the image of the medium, recreating an idealized “successful message” rather than being a message itself.

Each communicative medium has its own type of slop. Hallmark movies are slop for feel-good holiday entertainment; junk mail is slop for postal advertising. “AI slop” is actually “algorithmic slop” that happens to be AI generated. The algorithm, rather than a generative model, is the communicative medium, and we already had algorithmic slop through... See more