on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
What is ‘slop’? Critics of AI have increasingly used this word to express aesthetic embarrass-
ment, disappointment, even disgust with generative AI artistic production [9]. Historically, ‘slop’
referred concretely to liquid food for the ill (1658) and pig feed (1805) before metaphorically to
sentimentality (1866) and ‘nonsense, rubbish; insolence’ [6]. Today, the rise of ‘slop’ as a new
aesthetic category similarly registers a visceral distaste for AI art as a kind of sentimental non-
sense. Generative art, for example, despite impressive achievements in stylistic imitation, is easily satirized for an identifiable ‘house style,’ with highly saturated colors and digital, anime-inflected, and often idealized aesthetic qualities. AI-generated verse struggles not to write sing-song poems with rhyme and regular meter, and AI-generated prose is now long familiar for its flat and neutral style combined with an eager-to-please, ‘Certainly!’-like tone.
This paper is part of a larger project seeking to discover what constitutes ‘slop’ in AI-generated
cultural production. What specific aesthetic qualities, formal features, thematic concerns or other
characteristics lead us to perceive AI art as unimaginative? Hypothetically, I call the mechanisms
underlying slop ‘cultural collapse’—a variant on the concept of early model collapse…