The Endgame of Slop

posted September 05, 2026 @ 22:20 UTC

This topic is the main reason I set my blog up again. AI "slop" has already been extremely impactful to creative fields and will become substantially more disruptive with time. If we look at where the technology and incentive structures lead, the future looks pretty grim for artists with a passion for sharing their creative expressions with others.

Nobody Cares

I had a culture shock experience when I traveled to Buffalo, New York, recently. I saw AI generated artwork everywhere. No place I've been to has been even close to as bad about AI generated art as Niagara Falls, New York. There were giant building sized banners and signs with just AI generated images on them. I'm not one to buy souvenirs, but almost every single souvenir shop was just a ton of AI generated art plastered on mugs and shirts. Don't get me wrong, the falls were fantastic and I had a good time there, but I absolutely could not get this meme out of my head while I was there.

I apologize to the artist of the meme. None of the sources I could find have any signature or anything, so I can't find the original.

I was already aware that the tourist trap souvenirs on the street were already mostly just people that only cared about making money off of the attraction, but they're supposed to at least look to be selling local crafts. When they put AI generated art on a shirt, they've probably put less than 15 minutes of their own time into their "crafts". It somehow fails to be local or even a craft at that point. The souvenirs are neither physically produced locally nor designed locally since the artwork is produced in a datacenter and physically produced by something like Printful then just shipped out to the "local vendor". At least in the restaurant that has the AI generated menu, they probably care about making food and just saw AI as a convenience for the part they weren't good at or interested in. The t-shirt and mug business is the absolute bottom of the barrel of slop where there isn't even an illusion of caring about the craft.

That trip was a culture shock for me because in the smaller city I live in, I can (somehow) easily spend a whole day going biking through the town, going to parks, eating at local restaurants, and not see AI generated imagery. This isn't because "hur-dur, smaller town is better, it has artists that care about their craft and businesses that pay artists". I'm very confident that the difference is purely because my city in Florida is just technologically behind the curve compared to New York. In the case of Niagara Falls, I'd imagine that tourist traps are especially bad about this stuff in excess of your average city that's more ahead technologically. I've probably got about 1 year before I see 15 AI generated signs on my drive to work.

I bring up this experience to make an important point. As in the meme above, AI generated imagery is currently filling in the gap for capital-poor businesses that would see an artist as an excessive expense. My impression is that the average person really doesn't care and often times can't tell when something is produced by AI instead of a human (text, art, music, code, etc.). As the models improve, it'll be harder and harder to tell what's what. AI will go from filling a gap where people may have not hired an artist in the first place to places where artists were being paid, but the margins on the value were small, and depending on how good the models get, we may see human produced artwork nearly completely eliminated from "accessory" use cases like signage, corporate websites, etc., or even more widespread by impacting general media consumption.

The Artist's Eye

Something I've experienced from different perspectives as I've improved in art and dabbled a bit in music composition is that improving in a creative field mostly comes down to developing discerning senses that can tell what specifically is wrong with a work. In painting, there is some physical component to learn like getting muscle memory for clean strokes, but pixelart (my specialty) is an extreme case where there is almost no blocker between a technical understanding of what needs to be done to improve a work versus actually getting it done. Just click the pixels until they're all the correct colors! In an old video, I pointed out that coding usually just comes down to continuously breaking down a feature until you have specific logical rules that the feature needs to be composed from. In the simple case, the layman does not know how to break down the concept of a wall jump into the components of detecting collision with a force pushing horizontally into the collision and the velocity assignment in the opposite direction when the jump button is pressed. Similarly, the layman may see art and think, "Hey, this art doesn't look good. The proportions are all wrong." But if you ask them specifically which proportions are wrong and in what way, they wouldn't be able to fully quantify it and (as a result) wouldn't be able to fix it themselves. This is significant, not just because the artist develops the ability to tell what is specifically wrong with a work, but they've trained a sensitivity to their discipline that makes them notice issues with pieces that the layman may not even detect in the first place. Artists are (unsurprisingly) more capable of detecting AI generated pieces in their fields. There are already a lot of cases where works made by AI and human are indistinguishable to the layman. I've an amusing experience in music composition. I somehow placed 10th out of somewhere around 1,000 entries in audio in the Ludum Dare a while back. I thought the music was pretty catchy and I have trouble telling what is really wrong with it. Musicians have been able to dunk on it from a technical standpoint, but the average person appears to have really liked it and couldn't tell what was wrong with it. My ear is quite untrained in music. I accidentally autoplayed on YouTube into some AI generated music recently and honestly could not tell at all. When the consumer either doesn't care how something was made or isn't capable of telling for themselves, we end up with a dramatically different creative landscape simply because most people are not super active creatively.

I'll get to where this leads us in a moment, but first let me go over a point that a lot of artists make. The most common phrasings are that "AI art has no soul" or "AI art has no emotion or human expression". This is disputable, but my take is that this is almost an art direction issue. Especially in game development, the art, music, and even game mechanics are best when there's a cohesive idea and art direction. These can often times be in alignment to express a specific emotion or idea. As I implied above, I don't think the average consumer cares that much about appreciating art as an output of human experiences. They care about how it makes them feel. AI may be able to achieve the qualities that consumers look for in media. Right now, art direction is an unsolved issue in generative AI. I don't see why creating a larger cohesive piece of work would inherently be an insurmountable wall for AI. We haven't focused resources into that space and I think a large part of that is just that the people making the models are very unlikely to be the type of people to be informed in that discipline. Text to image generation is a lot flashier for now. Unless you believe in the spiritual/non-physical (which I do believe in as a Christian), the brain is just a bunch of neurons firing, so emotion shouldn't be some unquantifiable or non-replicable aspect of artwork if you exclude the value being placed in the work specifically having originated from a human. Personally, I view the overwhelming majority but not all human emotion as being driven in a naturalistic way (neurons firing in reaction to stimulus), but the artistic expression of human experiences have a spiritual value that sets it apart from AI generated art because it came from a human [2] [3] rather than the art itself being different in some way. A trained artist in most fields can distinguish AI generated art from human art fairly accurately right now, but I'm not confident that will always be the case.

The Future Media Landscape

I've established a few things either as a logical foundation or assumptions that we can start guessing at the future with. Businesses are driven by whatever consumers have demand for. Many consumers nowadays already don't show a noticeable preference for human created media over AI generated media and in some cases can't tell the difference. Here's a particularly gross case of consumer behavior preferring AI media. If the quality of AI generated media continues to improve, we may begin to see a strange landscape shift. Socrates famously criticized the increasing adoption of the technology of writing (which we only know about through writings).

"[...]and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." -Phaedrus 275a-275b

With most new technologies, there's a counter reaction that opposes it (Luddism for example). We can dispute whether the counter reaction is correct or not, but the trend seems to almost always be that the resistance fades with time. Likewise, I anticipate that the number of consumers that financially resist AI involvement in the arts by searching out and favoring human sourced media will be a shrinking group over time. The arts may be financially squeezed with vanishingly few numbers of jobs with good wages. People will continue to pursue art recreationally even if there is there is no monetary incentive. We may see a detachment of human arts from monetary incentives.

Another factor to consider, which we're starting to see just with the level of quality that current AI models are at, is that the ability to mass-produce media using AI has an effect of drowning out human created arts in the marketplace for money and eyes. If most people don't care if they're consuming AI generated media, the human artists should expect to have much less reach for getting eyes on their work. Practically for many people, it may be that you show your creation to your friends rather than drawing eyes globally through the internet. Maybe there will be some platform/website the only allows verifiably human creations, but it would be niche if most consumers prefer the infinite AI generated media. In the future we may look at the 2000s and 2010s as a golden age for artists.

All of this leaves the arts as something to be pursued recreationally for personal fulfillment rather than money or fame.

Fractured Attention

All forms of cultural media have seen a trend of fractured attention. When I was a kid, everyone watched many of the same movies and TV shows, played the same games, and heard the same news since there just wasn't that much variety accessible to people. With the internet, people consume a wider variety of media. Maybe they watch completely different YouTube channels or they play niche indie games that are much more accessible through the internet. If you talk to a random person in your town and you find out they play video games, most of the time you'll find that you don't even play the same games so there isn't much in common to talk about. As someone who plays indie games and doesn't watch movies, it's very apparent how the explosion of niches from the internet make it challenging to find stuff in common with people in my city. I think the social and cultural element of media consumption may be undervalued. AI could potentially get the point where it could generate hyper specific media catering to an individual's preferences at a level where very little media consumption would overlap with other people. This could lead to more social isolation in my view, but maybe people will still just pick a few things to consume collectively even if it doesn't match their personal tastes perfectly just to have more common experiences with others. There may be a future where this "common media" is specifically chosen to be human created media, but I wouldn't count on it.

One cultural staple that I think will have a fascinating interaction with a potential AI dominated landscape is sports. I don't know where I even originally saw this idea, but in 2016 when I was first learning about neural networks, I either read or heard some speculation on what we now refer to as the AI singularity. Sports are something that humans both recreationally participate in and socially follow through media because they're interested in what humans are capable of doing. Nobody walks up to a 100 meter sprint, fires a gun, and eliminates people's interest in the race because the bullet went faster than the humans. AI is better than humans at chess, but people still get excited by the competitive chess scene. Sports (and esports) will continue to persist regardless of what AI can do. Multiplayer games are a bit interesting here too. If you want to specifically play a game with humans, you're forced to pick common media (a game) to play with other humans. Maybe there is a game you would theoretically like more, but not enough other people would like it for you to play it with real humans. Singleplayer games on the other hand could be perfectly tailored to your preferences if you aren't looking for a common experience.

The slop of the future may not be slop in the form of things that consumers find low quality, but instead it is slop because there was no passion or human investment into the creation.

Where I See Myself

We may get to a future where AI can make any video game and everyone's attention is fractured to personalized media. It's very important to note that we're not there right now and AI could hit a wall at any point, so it is by no means guaranteed. However, in that kind of environment I could see myself leaning into arts with more physical mediums like painting, woodworking, playing instruments (with my own compositions), or even gardening. When you can see the 3-dimensional strokes of a human hand in a painting or can hear the slight variations from a human playing an instrument, I feel there's a more human impression in the art in the physical mediums than pixels on a screen. It's also nice to be able to just touch and feel the art. Right now I'm a pixel artist and not really a painter, but here's a Slowpoke I painted a while ago that I keep on my fridge and see smiling every day when I get out of bed.

It leaves more of an impression in my life than any of my pixelart pieces I've created over the years.

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