AI Slop and its Discontents
Autor*in
Herausgeber*innenschaft
Verlag, Ort, Datum
Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam, NH, Niederlande, 2026
Schlagwörter
Ästhetik, Artificial Intelligence, Medientheorie, Kunst im Internet, Meme Studies
ISBN/ISSN/ISMN, DOI
- ISBN/ISSN/ISMN:
- 9789083672175
text
This essay traces the discourse around "AI slop" back to its origins in 4chan's antisemitic "goy slop" template, arguing that the term smuggles in a conspiratorial structure - a hidden agent, a degraded mass product, a knowing critic - that forecloses structural analysis in favor of blaming a culprit. Reading Ari Aster's Eddington alongside the story of the glitch token SolidGoldMagikarp, the essay tracks how distributed, agentless processes (a Reddit community counting, a fish playing Pokémon, a language model) get retroactively re-anthropomorphized into singular villains or authors. Working through the major aesthetic complaints against generative AI - the loss of human genius, of aura, of authorship - the essay shows these arguments rest on a historically narrow, exclusionary figure of the creator. It argues that the aesthetic panic displaces the one critique with genuine material stakes: the ecological extraction and exploited annotation labor underwriting AI infrastructure, obscured precisely because outrage over "slop" is easier to make viral than analysis of land, labor, and energy.
Band, Seiten
INC network notion #6: Vectoral Agents 2, 61-72
Mediendateien
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