Let's Start An Anti-Slop League

the impact of AI art (and what to do about it)

Author

Matt Zeigler
March 03, 2025

What happens when the art used to drive AI-art gets further copied and twisted?

Slop.

I fell down an e-rabbit hole via Ted Gioia's note, "The New Aesthetics of Slop." He triggered a near-uncomfortable level of recognition. Just read this quote:

We have come a long way from the days of Impressionism and Naturalism and all the rest. Those were serious movements. They happened because of dedicated artists committed to their craft.

Slop is the opposite.

It’s the perfect aesthetic theory for 12 year olds with no artistic sensitivty—but possessing a crude sense of humor and lots of pop culture detritus in their heads.

Tech companies embrace this—and even brag about the sloppiness of their Slop. Each generation of AI aspires to new levels of whackness.

Ted Gioia

Remember when artistic movements meant something? When ideas weren't just reduced to hashtags, but remained a revolution in perception? Art, music, movies - the stuff that felt “cool” - in all of its scarcity too, it represents a weird manifesto of my (and probably your) subconscious.

The stuff we love is indicative of movements that captured our imagination – not just mine or yours exclusively, but as a collective resonance across time and space. We can trace these threads backward, studying them as shared visions where artists embraced core constraints to discover new things to say.

Every movement has a thumbprint of creators and constraints. We don’t have to like all of them to recognize what makes them interesting. And, if we start to see it this way, it can help us talk about what movements aren’t interesting and why.

Slop, by contrast, breaks from the artistic constraint of creating something worthy of discourse. Instead, it optimizes for what gets boosted by social media algorithms. The result is, to borrow Gioia's term (and you have to say it in KRS-One voice, is wic-wic…) "Whack."

Gioia doesn't stop there. He follows the money:

In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists—in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology.

In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop.

This seems like a paradox. Why is so much money devoted to churning out crap?

Ah, that’s part of the appeal of Slop. The audience’s gleeful mockery is actually enhanced by the fact that a huge fortune has been wasted in creating pointless and bizarre works.

In other words, this mismatch between means and ends is a key part of our aesthetic movement. Hence a certain degree of cynicism is embedded in both the production and consumption of Slop.

So what's an artist, creator, or fellow human to do in this slop-saturated landscape?

Retain a philosophy.

Serve people, not algorithms.

Make a movement that's art official, and be the one to lead a crew who will walk right up to your (re: slop's) face and diss you. Because if you = slop, you've already lost the battle.

We can do better. And the opportunity to do it? It's never been greater. The world is hungry for substance in a sea of algorithmic saltwater. For art that speaks to human experience rather than engagement metrics. For creation that nourishes rather than merely distracts just long enough to slow your scroll.

The revolution won't be algorithmically generated. It will be handcrafted, with intention, by those who remember what art is for. I’m at peace with that idea, even if if I’m at war with the slop.

Oh, and you knew this was coming - “Poppie’s a little sloppy”: