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Patreon Exclusive Video: Human Slop

🕑 Added 2025-05-22 13:31:55 +0000 UTC

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Just Like a Metaphor

I dislike this fiction that AI art isn't made by humans. Sure, it's a highly automated process where you don't need to draw a line, granted. But by that logic, we don't make photos or movies or animation or video games either, and who would say there is no art in those mediums? No subjectivity? No 'soul'? We have tons of art whose creation would be impossible without automation, and we have tons of proof of how this really doesn't matter with how 'artistic' or 'human' a work is (or isn't). Humanity has broadly accepted that human direction of a machine can be artistic for longer than I've been alive. Artificial means human-created, paper and pencils and paint aren't natural. All art is artificial, and everything artificial is completely, indelibly human. The criticism of training data harvesting is a new problem we have to figure out, but it's one of capitalism. It doesn't really hold water as critique of the art made with AI, it isn't like digital artists stop making art because of the exploitive creation of their Wacom tablets and PC parts. Most people don't like that exploitation and try to spend toward the least of it, but it doesn't mean the art created with it is bad, and the alternative is not making art because every medium has its exploitations. Even paint used to be horrifically toxic. So in the end, slop is just a pejorative. It means you don't like the thing, and the quality that makes it slop can be whatever you rationalize. It's language of prejudice against the outside medium, it's respectability politics, the posturing of aesthetic supremacy.

Leaf

"AI hasn't democratized Art, but it HAS democratized Slop." Oh no this is 100% true and I hate it. 😆

millimeter cohen

So for Art, the audience has to in some way submit to the subjectivity of the work to engage with it (create a "human connection"). But submission carries risk, what if you don't like the Art's subjectivity? What if the Art doesn't like you? Slop doesn't have a subjectivity (or its subjectivity is determined solely by the invisible hand of the market/algorithm) and so it doesn't pose that risk. AI hasn't democratized Art, but it HAS democratized Slop. In the absence of a subjectivity or the desire for one, choosing the object is creative control