Hi Crowd!
Yesterday Derek Guy posted about Emily Segal’s recently coined term “tasteslop” in part because of Phoebe Luckhurst’s big piece in The Times about it. If you are in the Telegram group you saw this come through last night but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. Tasteslop, as Emily defines it, is “1. Slop made out of things considered to be tasteful 2. Tasteful things deployed in service of slop, or 3. Recurrent tech discourse about the significance of taste.” Essentially the use of things considered to be tasteful, to convey the appearance of taste, without engaging with it or understanding why they are tasteful or what taste even is. This could manifest in generative AI imagery where “tasteful” things pop up to set a scene, just as much as random tasteless techbros copying the thing they saw somewhere else because they think it makes them look cultured. The end result of both is that the tasteful items may get tainted, and start to signify something other than intended. When I was telling Tara about this over coffee this morning I mixed up words and called it “trendslop” which also kind of works. I might have missed this interesting discussion had Derek not mentioned it, but it was this observation which really caught me:
Derek is right here, and as I mentioned in the replies there we’re already seeing people attempt to malign the work of others by labeling it slop.
This is a big topic I’m trying to pick apart for a forthcoming essay but essentially we’ve already crossed the line where that is a meaningless classification. At one point you could have wrestled with the separation of if something used AI or not, but AI is so integrated in everything now it’s nearly impossible to draw that line. I’m writing this post in one shot off the top of my head right in wordpress and my browser is warning me about my atrocious spelling and offering corrections so I don’t look like an idiot. A decade ago using spellcheck was innocuous, but now I don’t even know if there’s AI in the pipes. Am I using AI without even knowing it because I didn’t hit publish with that typed as ‘inocuous?’ Does that minor correction now imply that all my own thoughts and opinions here are meaningless slop? Of course it doesn’t, but what it shows is that calling things “slop” is being weaponized. Anything I like is good and real and authentic and honest and human and anything I don’t like is slop. That’s kind of where we’re headed, the actual involvement (or not) of AI is irrelevant.
In the essay I’m working on I’ve got a dozen examples on all sides of that (stay tuned for whenever I finish it) but the key thing is that people aren’t actually able to tell by looking at something (or listening to it, in some cases) if it’s AI or not, so it falls back to “do I like it.” And if you are the kind of person who hates AI but likes this thing, then the thing isn’t AI, but if you don’t like the thing then it’s much easier to just call it AI then explain what you don’t like about it. The artist SHLOMS recently made this blatantly obvious with his “Inferior Image” conceptual/performance piece, which started with this post:
It’s a few months old now so if you’ve been paying attention you’ve likely seen it already, and if not you can guess where this went. This of course is a real Monet painting, a small but important detail that hundreds of commenters didn’t know or bother to look up before explaining in detail how boring and soulless and disgusting this obvious slop was. SHLOMS has talked about the larger experience and what it says about how people react right now. Call something AI and people who hate AI will hate it, regardless of if it’s AI or not. So labeling things you don’t like “slop” becomes an immediate way to get others on your side and reinforce your opinions, regardless of their validity or factual basis.
I’ve actually been saddened to see some very thoughtful and creative friends repeat blanket criticisms or generalized positions about anyone publicly doing anything even remotely connected to AI because I know that means they haven’t engaged with it at all and are just reacting, which is disappointing. For anyone interested in getting a better understanding of the range and a few (of the many) examples of artists doing new, insightful and ethical things in the field, I can’t recommend this episode of Roger Dickerman’s DAM show with Refik Anadol and Dave Krugman enough. Two very different artists doing very different work, but who have both given it a lot of thought and have a lot to offer.
That’s all for now, going to finish rearranging my tasteful vintage guitar tube amps now. xoxo
-s