Severin Matusek

It used to feel really chaotic to me. I used to be like, how do we make sense of all this stuff? There's so much stuff. There's so many different moods, tones, attitudes, no cohesive narrative. But then once you get enough distance and look in the rearview you realize: that's a body of work.

Show up with your head a little low, show enthusiasm. That’s how culture works.

“Everyone’s focused on capabilities – typography, grids, colour theory – but those are the first things AI can replicate,” he says. “Then we pivot to taste, but taste alone isn’t resilient either. You can train a model on what’s tasteful.”

Real differentiation, Forest argues, comes from “taste- making ”, the ability to not only recognise trends, but... See more

Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing... the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.

The arrival of AI slop is simply the culmination of a long process of cultural slopification, and one of AI’s unexpected functions has been to launder the human slop so we can pretend we didn’t create it.

Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.

And a random Lana Del Rey review I stumbled across on Pitchfork a while ago said the job of the writer is “to whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving