I am so over AI-generated art. It just needs to go away. Please.
Like everyone, I was captivated by the tech as it emerged in 2022. As a novel technology, it was pretty mind-blowing. Type “Cat fighting in WW2” into a text-to-video generator, and in no time, you can get a clip of an American shorthair wielding an M1 Thompson submachine gun against Nazis.
A big draw of AI-generated art was that people without significant visual art skills, like me, could now whip up pretty interesting concepts without having to take the time to learn a talent or create the work. But unless you actually had a professional use case for creating AI-generated art and video, this draw quickly receded.
Many of us felt done with AI-generated art, but it was not done with us. Since the beginning of this year, AI-generated art has overrun my social media feeds, especially in apps centered around visuals, such as Instagram and TikTok.
I used to enjoy browsing Instagram’s Reels for short periods, watching clips of exotic world locations to add to my bucket travel list, the antics of funny cats and dogs, and videos about astronomy and history. Yet, in recent months, those videos have become fewer and far between. In their place is AI slop, the term given to the AI-generated content rapidly swarming our feeds.
Now instead of actual video and images, I see slop and more slop—and of some truly weird shit. There’s Shrimp Jesus and “countries as animals” (spoiler: Russia is an AI-generated bear, America is an eagle), and clips of children morphing into creepy creatures—the stuff of nightmares. And even when I am shown the traditional content I like—those astronomy videos and videos about history—the authentic images of the cosmos or from the front lines of WW2 have often been replaced with ones that are clearly AI-generated.
How do I know? Because the majority of AI-generated art tends to have the slop-sheen to it: It looks digitally airbrushed, like those bad mass-produced paintings you find at a thrift store that, at best, deserved to be hung on the backside of the door to the guest bathroom no one uses. Both try to convey reality but fail miserably at it. Or, as my colleague Mark Wilson has previously put it, AI-generated images “are as smooth as a Barbie doll, but like applying a beautifying filter to your face, they are paradoxically sharp and hazy at the same time; logical and senseless.”
