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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35727 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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In my experience so far, for every one AI-generated artpiece that was a genuine improvement over the alternative of "nothing" or "imagining it by reading a text meme", there are 10 thousand pieces of absolute slop that should have never been published with less effort than it took me to scroll past.

I see similar things on my social media, and I feel the exact opposite. The things that people call "AI slop" are, almost universally, things that would have been considered incredible works in the pre-generative AI era. Even today, they often have issues with things like hands, perspective, and lighting, and though they're often very easy to fix, just as often they aren't fixed before they're posted online. But even considering those issues, if someone came across such works in 2021, most people would find them quite aesthetically pleasing, if not beautiful.

So now we're inundated with this aesthetically pleasing slop that was generated and posted thoughtlessly by some lazy prompter, to the point that we've actually grown tired and bored of it. I see this as an absolute win, and I think my experience on the internet has become more pleasant and more beautiful because of it. I see it as akin to how Big Macs have become considered kind of slop food and eating it every day - an option almost anyone in the Western world has - would mark you as low status in many crowds, but for most of human existence, if you had that easy and cheap access to food that was that palatable and that nutritious, you'd be considered to be living an elite life. I think, for such access to such high quality food to have become so banal as to be considered slop is a sign of a great, prosperous world that is better than the alternative. So too for images (and video and music soon, hopefully).

I agree re: food. Not so with art. The entire purpose of it as I see it is for me to not be tired and bored, not to let me consume 1000 pictures of adequately technical, adequately colorful, adequately proportional and completely fungible content.

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