https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/
Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content
TIL
But there is no “spam-core” aesthetic
I beg to differ
This is most likely an error in space-time.
extended warranties have become a meme, and probably are an aesthetic
this is already a classic
This is the first time I realize that this famous image was not “designed” to simulate what a stroke feels like visually, it was just serendipity. They were probably just really trying to generate an image of a living room, but the AI image generators were still in its infancy.
I’ve commented about this before, but I do actually miss those first few generations of image generators. The first DeepDream style stuff was interesting but didn’t go very far, but this image in particular is a milestone for what came directly after.
I would love to run VQGAN+CLIP locally, for example, in some efficient way. It was fun to play with and to see how the model interpreted the input. And it wasn’t as scary as the tools we have now (especially when those are paired with the deep fake face swap stuff, for example)
I genuinely think slop is the perfect word for the current iteration of these image generators, both the image outputs themselves and the role they’re playing in the already-bleak digital media landscape.
I will mock AI “art” until my dying breath.
