Taste of Slop: AI creative production is still in its unconsidered infancyDraft

Last updated October 2026

AI creative outputs are usually labeled "slop." I remember the month of ChatGPT's public release in 2022: it opened the floodgates to rapid production of digital media of all kinds. I had one of those unprecedented instincts that this was a calm-before-the-storm. Over the last four years, things have been made. And its use is increasingly frowned upon as a sign of moral absence, bad taste, and laziness.

In many ways, this is true. Generative AI is the first invention in a long while that has wholly replaced some core human faculties in creative production. It can skip over tough parts of drafting and exploring alternatives in a medium it's familiar with. It can make decisions in a non-deterministic way, yet build upon the palatable parts of the collective conscious that the models are trained on. This is often the same mental gymnastics us creatives can get hung up on for days, weeks, or months at a time if you're like me. Instead of having to take retreats to recover from writer's block, break for random side quests, and meditate away creative anxiety, AI is now at the public's disposal to conjure complex scaffolding and solutions during a coffee break.

Few inventions compare in AI's accelerative possibility. One notable one is the printing press. When Gutenberg popularized movable type, he transformed the faculty of communication and writing forever. Yet the printing press is rarely looked upon with the same dastardly attitude as AI currently is.

Retrospect certainly benefits Gutenberg. <<Find a fact about how printing presses actually produced a ton of propaganda and shitty literature at the outset lol, and probably how it angered a lot of writers and calligraphers trained for a traditional world>>. But the upshot of movable type over 600 years later is, I suppose, positive: human knowledge was able to be disseminated en masse, spreading deep thought, fictions, and ideologies across continents. Literature was able to received and responded to at a much higher velocity, which caused a crucial boom in taste development, literary practice, and artistic movements for Renaissance Europe and beyond. Back in our present day shoes, we're probably still a bit too close to the popularization of generative AI to really understand its analogous impact on human agency long-term.

We definitely see the slop, though. This, combined with the treacherous extensions of late-stage capitalism and other extractive systems we've yet outgrown, compounds the activity. In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron suggests how an underlying entitlement to "Land" is what leads to people having a distorted relationship with creative production where (1) we create whatever we want with little consideration for material needs and consequences, and (2) we are dulled into treating the land, public space, others' attention, and "the World" (my phrasing, not Liboiron's) as a "sink" (this is Liboiron's word). We see this with AI usage: people are using it with constancy to create everything from meme-ified portraits of their pets to dropshipped baby shower decor on Alibaba. The creative processes of these artifacts are shortcutted: everything touched by AI tends to look the same because they're deriving from the same training data. These works are being mass-produced with little friction, and now we increasingly live in a digital and physical milieu of junk. It's a whole thing.

I believe we're still figuring out the "genius" in this software, and defining the craft in the medium. I think of another invention: personal phones. The first telephone certainly transformed a fundamental aspect of human thinking and communication. In a world where letter-writing and long-form communication with built-in gaps was normal, telephones reduced several of that norm's use cases. However, take Graham Bell's telephone and fast forward its role into today: we have completely overhauled the meaning of contact and availability in interpersonal relationships. We moved from written engagements through mail, to call times coordinated with operators and public payphones, to personal devices where texts can be sent and received 24/7. Now consider the elevation of spam, stalking, and fraud. Each stage of its technological evolution also simultaneously disintegrated a previous respect for personal autonomy. Yet I don't think I have to explain the more positive impacts of personal phones. As beings, we are more educated and aware. And though some would argue with me, I think we are more capable of identifying with humanity as a global species—one aware of but also beyond national and ethnic labels, which is both spiritually and evolutionarily rewarding.

In this way, with every autonomy-transforming technology, we have traded some human agencies to gain others. However, in thinking as a species existing over a longer time arc, it seems we've learned to adapt and evolve our cognition, habits, and relationships with every new device. I echo Marshall McLuhan's arguments that technologies are appendages to human beingness, and eye AI through this lens, over deep time. Although there's lots of doom around AI ruining creativity, creativity is a human skill that we will always have access to. Even in the darkest ages designed to suppress that habit, we can't help be create again. Its compulsion is our nature. Once we understand what true creativity and craft means within this new paradigm of tooling—this time, a software that can echo predigested visual-verbal sentiments and awarenesses with unwavering loyalty—I think we may reach new heights: new defining instances of "art" and "literature", new self-conceptions of what makes a human, and even new ways of understanding the boundary between one person and another and the ecologies we participate in with other beings. As we've learned with the printing press and telephone, a transformation of some crafts and faculties can propel and even generate others, if used considerately.

The keyword for me is "considerately." The reason AI slop is slop is because it's not considerate. The AI-generated meme pet portrait lacks human consideration for the little decisions that make a portrait artistic: the dog's pose, the composition, the critical approach to visual trends. The pet portrait is the poop of a stochastic parrot, to borrow Bender et al.'s term. It's a thoughtless knockoff. It's a creation that isn't creative in real sense.

The sign that we're beginning to overcome slop—in our analogies, the printing press' propaganda and yellow journalism, and the telephone's inappropriate and fraudulent contact—is not ludditism or technological rejection, but humans spending loving time with the medium. Pinnacles of literature were popularized through movable type, once writers like <> fully understood the wit and influence of mass-circulated writing. These writers took the craft to higher heights of consideration: if it were possible that hundreds of thousands, even millions of people around the world to hear their words, those words better be damn meaningful and deliberate. Beholding their consequence—not rejecting or becoming unanimously anti—led the technology to fulfill its role as a true extension of the human condition a la McLuhan, a loyal representation of techne as art and technique, in the Greek etymology. From here, great works can be made.

Each unprecedented invention has this threshold where taste in its medium is developed and honed at the seam of its poor use vs. considerate use. When loving intention is poured into a phone call, we see its generative possibility in novel ways. What can long-distance companionship become? Phones shortcut thought to action: digital contact can be bothersome and oppressive, but by way of equal weight, it can also institutionalize a sense of safety and care, knowing for example, a loved one is just a call away, or you can keep updated on a friend going through a rough patch. I think of Samira Rajabi's All My Friends Live In My Computer: for many people, including disabled folks, symbolic mediation through digital, visual-verbal means provides connection and community in ways otherwise inaccessible. These new cognitive and behavioral means enable something an old world was missing.

Consideration encompasses a caring intention, curiosity about the medium's potentials especially for underserved beings, and critique of its constraints. When we move from a world pre-invention to post-invention for any invention, things are both gained and lost. Considering what is sacred across what is both new and lost is the work of taste development. We're still in the prologue of this for AI.

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