AI Slop Is a Mandate for Humans to Do Better

We were somewhere on the long winter road back from a weekend of skiing when my youngest daughter asked for music. The car smelled like wet wool and melted snow and stale french fries. Our bags were stacked in the back, slowly thawing.

I kept my eyes on the road and blindly scrolled the satellite radio channels on the screen until she said "stop there! No, go back one. Yes, there!" My finger was resting on Hits 1, the most aggressively cheerful frequency available to mankind. Very on-brand for Julie.

We listened as the songs poured out one after another, identical in almost every way. The voices were polished past recognition, inflated and compressed and sanded until their unique texture was gone. Each voice digitally massaged into some producer's concept of perfection.

The subject matter did not wander far:

Someone wanted someone. Someone had lost someone. Someone had become a different person and was now nostalgic for the previous version of themselves. Someone was pretending to feel less than they felt. Someone was self-mythologizing under late capitalism.

The songs circled these ideas like buzzards around roadkill, with just enough meat left on the bones to get a scrap.

After about an hour we all agreed that we could use a break. The silence inside the car felt like stepping out of a casino into cold night air.

A machine could generate an unlimited supply of these songs.

It's no surprise then that an AI-generated track called Walk my Walk managed to slip into the Billboard chart and ignite a moral panic among musical purists.

The objection, usually phrased with some version of this isn't real music; it took no effort, rests on a misunderstanding about what the Top 100 actually is.

Hollywood figured this out long ago, and arguably sowed the seeds of its own destruction. The modern Marvel slop consumes hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of technicians. All to produce a work of predictable slop that, predictably, generates billions. It's dazzling entertainment, but entertainment all the same.

No one walks out of a Marvel movie convinced they have just been inside the mind of the next David Lynch.

Art is different. It arrives like a structural crack in the zeitgeist; a shape nobody has seen before, that asks our eyes to adjust.

Pollock dripped paint across the floor and everyone had to reconsider what a painting was; Mondrian split the world into rectangles and colors; Picasso broke faces into shards; Banksy forced the art world to take street art seriously.

There is one of each of these people. They break the ground that thousands of careful admirers walk on after.

Machines make great admirers.

They absorb the patterns of a million existing songs and produce a smooth hill of familiarity to our ears. If the cultural terrain were a mountain range, AI would flatten it into a parking lot.

This leaves us humans, with our wetware and meat, with a rather uncomfortable assignment.

If the machines can produce infinite competent noise, then the only territory left to explore is the territory that does not yet exist.

People like to frame AI as the mechanism by which humanity becomes lazy and half-conscious, our thinking outsourced to the cloud. Maybe that will happen to some percentage of the population; history suggests a lot of people prefer comfort to invention.

But creative people operate differently, moving outside the implied boundaries of society, pursuing novelty even when markets reward imitation.

In the early 2020s, comedians complained society had become impossible. Every joke stepped on a landmine; every crowd came preloaded with grievances. According to them, the craft had died. Nothing was funny anymore.

So they burned their old material.

Night after night they walked on stage. They bombed. Then, suddenly, they got funny again.

What changed? What's funny. Comedy survived its extinction event by finding the funny again, by reinventing the craft.

The same process now sits in front of every creative field that has grown comfortable producing standardized output: music; writing; illustration; design; architecture. The comfortable middle of those industries just acquired a tireless creator that will happily generate ten million variations without boredom or complaint.

Which means the human middle needs to be redefined.

If a machine can produce the thing you spent six months perfecting, then the obvious response is to stop making that thing. You don't need to anymore! Joy!

More time to find the idea that hasn't been tried yet; the awkward shape.

That work has always existed, the difference now is that it's no longer optional. The average human can, needs to, will be, more creative than ever before.

The Billboard charts and box offices indicate very little art. They were never meant to. They are commercial artifacts built by human teams who understand the value of attention. Nothing wrong with that. The world has room for candy.

But if we decide we dislike machines producing that same candy faster and cheaper, then the responsibility lands back where it began.

Human beings made the first slop; if we want something better in its place, it needs to come from humans.