I’ve been considering a frightening prospect. What if the next generation is known as The Slop Generation? A generation unaccustomed to the world before the inception of AI-generated slop. Despite successes or failures with generative AI, it seems the AI-generated cat is out of the slop bag with the power to warp artistic expressions and further devalue art and the creative process.

This Slop Generation will be the most technologically advanced yet least capable and emotionally unstable of any generation. This is a byproduct of the value of life’s undertakings being picked clean by the vultures of innovation, leaving only the bones littered across the barren landscape. This has far-reaching consequences, but here we focus on art.

Art

When we think of art, we tend to think of images, but art encompasses different mediums, such as music, images, video, and the written word. The results of the artistic process are cultural artifacts with lasting permanence. This permanence can raise some artistic works into modern consciousness despite the passing of centuries, think The Mona Lisa, Beethoven’s 5th, or even the petroglyphs on Newspaper Rock.

Wikipedia defines art as:

Art describes a diverse range of cultural activity centered around works utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, and/or beauty.

I mentioned the petroglyphs, but we have far older examples of art than these. Neanderthals drew cave paintings 64,000 years ago. Art predates society.

These artistic expressions lead to wonder. What were they trying to say? Were they documenting something? Were they trying to tell people something? Or were they having fun? The mystery is part of the allure. You get none of this with AI art. There’s no wonder, no mystery, no deeper meaning, just slop. Nobody wonders what the AI was trying to say when it adds an additional finger to a generated picture. When a human does it, we search for a meaning.

For over 64,000 years, art has been a part of us, but this may be coming to an end as people hail the post-human era. Enter The Slop Generation.

The Slop Generation

The Slop Generation won’t be defined by their cultural constructions and artistic expressions but by the output of one-arm bandit slop machines where artistic expressions aren’t created to be admired and revered but as individualized wallpaper blending into the background noise of life. A reincarnated version of the noisy, animated GIF-ridden world of early Geocities pages with higher fidelity and less permanence.

All art will be ephemeral, a momentary passing unworthy of saving and revisitation. Shrimp Jesus is their Mona Lisa, and some anonymous rando using a throwaway prompt is their Davinci, but this work isn’t held in any esteem, quickly forgotten and tossed into the low attention span waste bin of modernity.

All art will be ephemeral, a momentary passing unworthy of saving and revisitation.

Low attention spans won’t allow for appreciation, detail, or discerning deeper meaning or context in an artistic representation. This means all art must be literal, or else it is completely misunderstood. A child with a fork next to an electrical outlet will always be just that and never a representative warning in the context of larger cultural issues. The medium is the message.

In Generation Slop, no artists create works for others to enjoy, only algorithmic outputs catering to whatever whim we have at the moment. These outputs are created for an audience of one. Everything pushed and nudged to the dense center of a data distribution creating more predictable outputs and algorithmic uniformity. Why listen to someone else’s slop when you can generate your own?

None of this is a problem for The Slop Generation since art should look cool and serve no other purpose. Fidelity should trump meaning, as art requires consumption at a glance. Art is worthless if it can’t be consumed while multitasking. Any art requiring attention won’t be acknowledged, much less appreciated.

Art from the Slop Generation is cold and disconnected from humanity, unable to strike a chord or illicit emotion. Those trying to use slop machines to illicit emotions will have to resort to extremes, often to get any attention at all, much less an emotional response.

With AI-generated novels, they become worthless wastes of space existing purely for the vanity of the person who generated them, but even these people won’t read their own novels.

In Generation Slop there’s no sense of style, no sense of taste, no investment of any kind. It is the perfect low-attention-span content for the devalue generation as the point becomes getting to the bottom as fast as possible.

With art like music, the pitch will be you can hear a different song every time you listen without one repeating, and this will be seen as a benefit, even though this generation wouldn’t know if a song is repeated anyway since nobody actually “listens” to music. Music becomes background noise for other life activities, nothing more than a sonic firewall to keep the outside world out.

Traditional art, like the art in museums, exists purely to stand in front of for a quick selfie and post to social media. There’s no time for appreciation. Those notifications won’t check themselves. Art will continue to lose its value as nobody appreciates it anymore. The human work and toil that went into their creation are unappreciated because everything seems so easy, and doing anything hard is a waste of time.

This is The Slop Generation’s perspective as they rush headlong into post-humanism.

The Downward Slide

This shift to rapid-fire slop will be a net negative for humanity, as we lose something fundamental to the human experience connecting people and cultures for time immemorial. Art helps us understand the world, other people, and even ourselves in a way other mediums can’t convey. An entire generation may never discover the benefits of creating and consuming art, along with the positive effects this brings.

Take the novel, for instance. I hear so many people brag about never reading fiction as though it’s a badge of honor, assuming that nonfiction is the only way to “learn” something from reading, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Works of fiction are vehicles for conveying big ideas. That’s why most books banned throughout history were works of fiction. Life isn’t a tutorial and doesn’t align with specific steps.

Imagine trying to convey the message of dystopian works like Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World in a nonfiction format. It doesn’t strike the same chord or have the same impact. Both authors wrote essays and discussed these concepts in interviews, but these never created the impact that the novels did.

Fiction written by humans can be instructive. It can help us understand situations, other people, and cultures in ways other mediums cannot. Even movies with all of their visual and audio aspects don’t bring us inside the heads of characters like written works of fiction do.

Written works invite us to participate, exercise our imagination, and consider our own thoughts and perspectives. But this invitation requires our attention and an investment of time, attributes many don’t know how to exercise and believe they don’t have. Without exercise, we lose our imagination and our ability to connect. This is why, despite being so connected, people feel more disconnected than ever, mistaking digital connection for human connection.

Written works invite us to participate, exercise our imagination, and consider our own thoughts and perspectives.

When all art is literal, it loses its sense of mystery and wonder but also has degrading knock-on effects. At a local writer’s group meeting around 2018, I watched attendees dole out their usual mixture of helpful and non-helpful feedback to a girl on the chapter she’d written. One of the biggest criticisms was show, don’t tell.

I remember telling the attendees I’d been thinking about that piece of writing advice. I was concerned that younger generations may be unable to deliver the required attention to a piece. You may need to write shorter fiction that actually “tells” instead of shows because they won’t be able to infer emotion or meaning from the act of showing. I mentioned I thought it was because of YouTube and tutorial culture, where people won’t try anything without being told everything first. I still think this plays a part, but it may be a symptom.

Ultimately, the foundational concept of show, don’t tell in fiction may need to be thrown out like yesterday’s garbage, as future generations cannot infer deeper meaning from descriptions. If you are unfamiliar with the rule, here’s an example of what the transformation may look like.

She folded to the ground, collapsing like a house of cards as she shut her eyes and tucked her lips behind her teeth.

Becomes.

She was disappointed and knew it was hopeless.

Okay, this is not my best description, but it’s enough for you to get the point: a degradation in quality to meet low-attention-span readers, which makes people avoid reading.

Ultimately, anyone who might have been interested in more traditional art will be turned off by a warped lack of incentives, never having a chance to discover the real value of art and the artistic process. This generation’s inability to delay gratification means any activity requiring practice and investment will be considered a waste of time.

In the future, the creation of art may very well morph into other activities like a video game. This may even be pitched as a game you can play with others. Although this may be fun (video games are fun) and seem like a sort of progress, the devaluation continues, and everything from the previous section applies.

I spent most of this section discussing written work since it made for a better demonstration, but these same principles apply to all other forms of artistic expression.

Mistakes and Misunderstanding

Applying AI-generated works to a low-attention environment leads to a fundamental mistake: mistaking resolution for quality. They aren’t the same. I’ll write more on this later, but you can see this with all of the generated Veo 2 examples. These examples have a high resolution (look good visually) but poor quality (they actually suck).

A human actor playing a part performs the emotions supposedly taking place in the character’s head. These are the types of things that are missing in AI-generated video. The generations are unfeeling, giving the impression of being dead inside. That’s because the actual creator (the AI) was never alive to begin with.

Quite a few people working in tech think people who don’t shouldn’t have jobs. These same people believe programs that don’t lead to technological progress are a waste of money. If you are trying to understand the current moment, look no further.

From this perspective, since art can be easily generated, the value of creating must be minimal, and anything that adds friction to the process must be bad. We need to push back against this narrative, not because it’s misguided but because it’s flat-out wrong.

Use AI For What It’s Good For

There’s a growing AI backlash, which is understandable but misguided. This situation isn’t helped by AI influencers and tech executives making stuff up and overhyping claims whenever their mouths open. Hating the tech because you hate the people making it isn’t a recipe for success.

AI isn’t purely ChatGPT or even LLMs. Many different AI approaches have various benefits for humanity and the potential to accelerate cures for many of humanity’s ails. Notice I used the word accelerate instead of cure. People can wield hubristic ignorance, blinding them to the fact that humans solved problems before the arrival of AI.

We want AI to provide benefits, such as cures for cancer and hunger and ending geopolitical conflict. But solving real problems with AI is hard, especially when AI can actually exacerbate some of these problems instead of solving them. Solving non-problems with AI is easy. This is why we get AI art instead of cures for cancer.

The goal here isn’t AI avoidance but AI selective usage. Don’t use “AI for everything,” as the poor advice goes, especially for art. Put a firewall around activities you value where AI would degrade the activity and use AI for more mundane activities to gain efficiencies. We can have the best of both worlds if we want to. We can cure cancer and protect art. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.

If you have kids, leaving room for friction and discovery is important. Let them explore different creative tasks and help them understand the benefits that manifest from the investment of time and effort. They’ll discover that this investment will pay far more dividends than any momentary gratification from AI art as they make new discoveries and learn about themselves. Unfortunately, this isn’t easy and will take work, which is why many take this path. Delay device usage as long as possible, and let them explore without mediation.

Unfortunately, this shift to The Slop Generation is already happening, and we are losing the battle to instant gratification and a sense of false, momentary satisfaction at the sacrifice of lifelong satisfaction. I’m going to leave you with a couple of quotes from Ted Chiang’s article called Why AI Isn’t Going To Make Art.

But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.