Images of AI Slop reflect an aesthetic of algorithmic power: the amplified feedback loop of social media and AI, of optimization and prediction. We have not trained our eyes to see this in the image yet, because we are so unaccustomed to the scale of what generative AI does – both within and beyond the images.

If everything is up for grabs, everything is transgressive, and nothing matters much at all. The entire landscape of our visual culture can become subject to a detached, aesthetic disinterest. Everything can be reduced to data to be manipulated. Once you believe that, you can easily come to believe wholesale in the ideological project of AI.

The result is often critiqued as soulless. AI-generated text and images suffer from the absence of the weight of the real. The AI slop of AI images and the AI slop of algorithmic decision-making have this in common: they can only point at data. They never base decisions on reality. Nonetheless, the decisions are rolled out into reality as if they did.

They are also restructured references to, primarily, social media content, with the model making aesthetic choices based on what it has learned from the feedback loop of viral posts.

Another pleasure of an aesthetic experience – at least for Kant – is the absence of a clearly defined category for which to connect and identify that experience.

To the AI critic, referentiality is evidence, not an informed nod to a broader cultural context but of the model's theft of intellectual property.

I keep returning to aesthetic detachment to understand the pleasure of manipulating symbols with AI. Art requires playfulness, and playfulness involves a lack of investment in the thing played with. We would not play absent-mindedly with a sacred object if we understood it was sacred. But history is filled with the sacred artifacts of a culture played with by those indifferent or hostile to that culture. Playing with those images inspires resistance.

a normalization of algorithmic scale

This has given rise not only to scammers and misinformation, but to a more earnest strand of AI Slop: the work of untrained artists using a machine in a very straightforward way, benefiting from the baked-in algorithmic manipulation of social media that rewards them with attention for sharing it. For some who grew up in the algorithmic era, the Slop “aesthetic“ must seem very natural—a kind of aesthetic familiarity or even nostalgia, similar, perhaps, to the feelings associated with 8-bit video games among some children of the 80s and 90s.

AI slop is thus a reflection of what our social media filters see, reversed to create optimized versions.

"To be disinterested is to take pleasure 'in the mere representation of the object,' not in its existence." AI is not only disinterested, it is wholly incapable of interest.

This rise of the technocrats will have ramifications on tech regulations, sure. But it is also a form of politics that treats government as a social media interface, designed to amplify outrage, bully those in disagreement and make constructive dialogue impossible. It’s a momusocracy: government by force of the troll.

Slop – in the sense of the flood of information and the calibration of how information is filtered – is power.

This is a fusion of social media, the ideology of AI, and power, all leveraged to aim the swarm gaze toward harassing civil servants Musk disagrees with.

what images are meant to look like.

Large language models lack what linguistics calls a referent.

AI slop breaks down the inquiry and investigation into the world as it is, replacing the critical landscape with text and image fragments that affirm the world as it is imagined. In essence, it circumvents any desire to understand the world because it offers us the immediate satisfaction of having a feeling about the world.

AI slop is extremely viral, and so is outrage.

Slop is a problem that can persist through strategic negligence: there is no need to prioritize a problem if that problem is helpful to the people tasked with repair.

Much of our digital lives occur within slop infrastructure. Slop merits deeper engagement because it is a by-product of the same information system it is now clogging up.

Though almost literally "autocratic," this AI-generated worldview is neither left nor right-wing, but a fusion of cyberlibertarianism and technocratic neoliberalism. Today it is a project with enough entry points to form its own agenda, priorities, myths and abstractions, rituals of inclusion and exclusion, and crucially, an invitation to enjoy its fantasy.

scientific sterilization of variety and unpredictability in the name of reliable, predictable behaviors.

I don't see AI slop as disinformation, but about the reality that information of any kind, in enough quantities, becomes noise. It is, I argue, a symptom of information exhaustion, and an increased human dependency on algorithmic filters to sort the world on our behalf.

"low quality media, including writing and images, made using generative AI technology" used as "filler content that prioritizes speed and quantity over substance and quality."

posting jarring AI content to lure engagement

Shrimp Jesus

attempting a certain productivity to do with the dismantling limits of the body

On an internet without hyperlinks, where every post must be completely digestible in someone’s feed within microseconds of a user seeing it, your face, your physical body, is the last thing left that can connect across platforms. And creators like Cho have figured out that that’s one of the last reliable ways to keep their personas consistent across every platform they have to post on. It just so happens to turn out that the only impulse strong enough to still reliably motivate someone to figure out how to find your website is horniness.

And because it’s not just porn that’s going through this transition from top-down platform to bottom-up creator, it also means that a lot of viral content is beginning to feel a little porny.

this breakdown between porn world and not-porn world is having strange side effects on culture.

It was bas relief. It wasn't completely in the round, but you could feel the scratchiness of the clothing. You could feel the roundness of the pearls. And so, in that regard, it was a lifelike three-dimensional model of a two-dimensional representation. Is this the way to go? Because, we could do 3D prints of everything in the collection.

A very interesting example of just this issue was raised when they had the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum, and they brought together numerous relics and the beautiful reliquaries within which they were set, and icons from Byzantium and elsewhere in the eastern parts of Europe and put them on display. Now, the visitors included people of the Eastern Orthodox faith, and, in that faith, the proper way in which to venerate an icon is to kneel before it, to pray before it and to kiss it.Now, was the British Museum going to allow visitors to kiss this exhibition, the items in this exhibition? Or actually, shouldn't the British Museum have obliged everyone to do so? Merely viewing such icons from a distance and not engaging in that sensory interaction with them would be to defeat their sensory presence, their way of being in the world. And so, I would love to see more experimentation with historically appropriate manners of viewing.

there's this phenomenal bureaucratization of the senses that goes on in the way, in which, for example, you go to an art gallery or a museum to see, to a concert hall in order to listen, to a restaurant to taste or to dine, and to a gym to exercise.

a lot of these objects were not meant to be put in a museum. A lot of them were in people's homes, in their cabinet of curiosities, or in the place where only men would be able to gaze at them, or in churches or in other different formats. And then now that they're in a museum setting with general visitors, what is the museum's responsibility in how we are talking about this, how we're choosing to display them, how we're choosing to talk about them in the labels, in the catalogs, in the exhibitions? Because all of that is adding to the art historical knowledge.

I think so many things draw me to museums. And I think it depends on, we have multiple identities, right?

The question of whether I link to one of my old posts or not isn’t answered by whether they’re related, but by whether the act of linking serves a purpose.

I’ll keep asking for more of the world for more of life for every second to be suffused with the feeling of eternity.

The Internet should be treated like public property, not private property.

Living alongside our friends, spouses, parents, and children, we wonder if they’re the same people we’ve always known, or if they’ve lived through changes we, or they, struggle to see.

But others have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home.

And in my personal experience, the stuff I create that comes from my actual emotions and actual passions seems to resonate the most, and when I try and create ‘content’ that I think will ‘have wide appeal’ it tends to fall flat.

这些拟物化的设计增强了物品的质感与质地，追求于在最高程度上还原现实。

我们对过往时间湮灭的缅怀 常见于中老年女性群体中的荷花在中国传统文化的语境中常用来表示吉祥 但由于中老年群体的广泛使用 使得荷花的形象开始泛滥 并被重新发掘意义

它们的美妙就藏在它所要传达的内容里

与PPT艺术字结合起来

或早期韩流卡通插画的风格

偏向非主流类的闪亮像素图

其次是寓意吉祥正能量居多

designed to docu-ment failure or deficit rather than to provide opportunities to redress existing inequities

whose work functions as yet another layer of surveil-lance.

Buyers become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.

Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that turns a commodity into a cultural item, turning the logic of all manufacturing into this: your brand, our products.

That the 2010's never really figured out what they were. Its access to unlimited information and upcycling stopped it from ever genuinely having its own picturesque moment the decades before it saw. It was overwhelmed by its existence within this new framework and the possibilities that came from the internet.

amateur

o see these webs in places they are perhaps not as relevant

pg. 9

With that training, however, the expert loses the ability to see anything that contradicts the form that she knows to be visible. Perception training shapes and sorts the universe, outlining edges and arranging parts into wholes.

western thinkers saw knowledge the same way they saw the rest of the world: ordered.

a more diffuse one, web-like

Walter Ong claims that writing is a technology and is therefore an artifi cial act

Branding, logos, layout, and context all cre-ate meaning, but, when thrown into the digital environment, such attributes are destabilized, stripping a fully clothed document into nakedness as more variables are thrown into the mix.

“If you are looking at the object, you need not think of it; but if you are having the visual experience by the exclamation [I exclaim “A rabbit!”], you are also thinking of what you see.”

Th is, of course, asks a great deal of what used to be called the reader. He must now perceive the poem as object and participate in the poet’s act of creat-ing it, for the concrete poem communicates fi rst and foremost its structure.

One of the aims of concrete poetry is to render all language into poetic icons, similar to the way that everyone can understand the meaning of the folder icon on the computer screen.

Readability was the key: like a logo, a poem should be instantly recognizable.

By drawing our attention not to what they are saying but how they are saying it, Language Removal Services inverts our normative relationship to language, prioritizing materiality and opacity over transparency and communication.

A simple gesture of removal reveals a lot about the visual think-ing, politics, and editorial decisions behind what is presented as stable and objective information, elegantly revealing the structures of power and subjectivity behind the news.

a “dinosaur egg,” wrongly titling a song for the purposes of promotion

Our digital ecology is a virtual corollary to Debord’s urbanism, and many of the same gestures he proposed in meatspace can be enacted on the screen.

mapping the psychic and emotional fl ows of a city instead of its rational street grids

there was no language acting upon other language to form such ruptures.

Of course, this isn’t poetry, nor was it meant to be, rather it shows us that even seemingly meaningless and random sets of alphanumeric can be infused with poetic quali-ties.

based on the 20 x 20 grid of standard Japanese writing paper. Every “Pure Poem” consists of four hundred characters, each a number from one to three.

Reading aloud is an act of decoding.

Words are no longer primarily transparent content carri-ers; now their material quality must be considered as well.

Yet what happens when sense is not foregrounded as being of pri-mary importance?

a hover can display a piece of data that is contained within themicrointeraction

something the target users will recognize as a trigger in context.

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directly refers to one thing by mentioning another