The age of artificial intelligence, or AI, is upon us. The Turing Test (or the logic behind it, if not its exact format) has been passed more times than we have actually recorded, and a massive amount of human labor, from writing and graphic design to academic study, coding, accounting and so much more, can all be done by an artificial mind that thinks as creatively as a real human.
Except, that isn’t the case. While it is true that AI has convinced (far too) many people that it is a real, living, fully-conscious being, the reality is that passing the Turing Test speaks more to the gullibility of humans, more so than the actual consciousness of AI.
AI, as it exists today, is actually an LLM, or Language Learning Model. It is a pinnacle of human technological achievement, yes, but it still doesn’t think in the same way humans do. As an LLM, modern AI is not capable of creative expression. It can throw together colors and words based on the work of actual creative beings (humans), but it doesn’t do more than that. It is a conglomerate of information. A highly-impressive and advanced conglomerate, sure, but still a conglomerate.
You may be asking why that actually matters, if it still results in a pretty picture or a well-written article. There are many reasons why one might choose a human over AI, such as not wanting to support a technology that kills jobs and steals creativity, or not wanting to support a technology that is overall detrimental to our ecosystem and specifically, our water supply, or, maybe that person just wants to support their local economy, instead of supporting a billion-dollar corporation that doesn’t care whether you live or die.
All of that aside (if you can put it all aside), any organization, whether that be a business, nonprofit or an individual person seeking to promote themselves in some way, should be wary of the public’s growing discontent with “AI slop,” and the opportunity this provides them.
AI slop refers to AI created pieces of work that are deemed cheap and generic, usually referencing images but not exclusively. Many pieces of writing, from the one-sentence reviews of TV shows and movies you see on Amazon Prime, to entire books that have been published, read and quickly forgotten by everyone who actually got through them in their entirety, can be considered AI slop. AI slop is, at its core, anything made by AI that feels cheap, lazy and generic to the audience.
If you’re telling yourself, “but Noah, that describes most if not all AI creative work…” you are correct. AI, by its very nature, produces profoundly generic (or slop) content.
And why does it feel that way? There are several reasons, but the core reason goes back to AI actually being an LLM, not true intelligence. First, AI tends to make mistakes that humans (especially trained and experienced professionals) wouldn’t even make in the first place. No human artist worth their salt is going to provide you with an advertisement where the person holding the product has 7 fingers on one hand, or 3 left hands in one image that magically stem from two arms. No human writer who cares about their craft is going to produce work that overuses the same cadence, the same rhetoric, and the same specific grammatical conventions as millions of other pieces of work, to the extent that everyone who reads it feels bored and cheated of their time and attention. These are mistakes that humans don’t make, because we don’t create things in the way AI compiles things.
At the current rate of media consumption, people can tell pretty quickly when there is an obvious pattern across different channels, creators, brands, or whoever else is putting out content. From video games and movies to books, TikTok videos and even academic articles, people are noticing when something is generic and made with AI. This has happened before, is happening now, and will continue to happen in the future. When a brand puts out something made with AI, it is not only painfully obvious, but it screams “we don’t care enough about this to put in any genuine effort, or to make this special in any way.” What does that tell you about their product or service? Nothing good, I can assure you.
Now to the core issue: AI, by its own definition, cannot create. It can copy, it can compile, and it can steal. But, creativity itself comes from experience and emotion. It is the very expression of the human condition. AI can tell you what 100 other people said about a cheeseburger, but until it can actually taste the meal, sit in the restaurant and bullshit with the staff about the horrors of customer service, it’s not actually creating anything. Instead, it is providing the most generic responses to exist, based on existing creative content.
The result of relying on AI for creative work is living in a world where everything feels overused, unoriginal and generic. The things that make people, places and cultures feel special will be replaced with the same content, the same art style, the same language, so that every commercial, every song, every article and every other creative work feels indistinguishable from one another. Goodbye style, goodbye pizzazz, and goodbye to that unique sense of brand loyalty and community that you were hoping to cultivate for your organization. Because if you use AI, and so does your competitor, and so does the rest of the industry, how does anyone plan on truly standing out?
While it is true that all creative work is based off of existing work and nothing is truly original, it is also true that each individual human experience shapes that creative work into something new and unique in the way that stained glass shapes light. AI simply cannot do this, because AI simply does not experience. It has nothing new to add, no perspective to share, no life experience to rely on.
The point being made is that AI does not create; it only compiles what humans have already created. And while this compilation of human opinion can be helpful in some scenarios, it cannot replace creative work that comes from an individual who has a unique human perspective.
Due to this nature of mass aggregation and soulless compilation, most AI art ends up looking and feeling like, well, slop. And this slop, even if it looks alright on the surface, always ends up feeling profoundly generic and cheap when it is finally consumed by an audience.
Now, I understand a logical counter to this take would be to simply specify the prompt you provide an AI in order for the AI to spit out something that appears more unique than the generic style of AI art.
There are two main issues with this.
First, prompts themselves trend. That super unique prompt that you used to make some cool, unique art? Thousands, if not millions, of people are about to do the same thing. Nothing made through AI is inherently unique, and the more people use it, the less unique it appears, even to people who were willing to accept it in the first place.
Second, any piece of AI art that actually appears to be unique is only made so through the use of specific prompts that invoke the artistic styles of real artists. In other words, for AI “art” to even be capable of tricking people into thinking it is, in fact, art, it has to steal from real artists. Not only is this exact scenario being argued over in several open court cases that will likely become landmark cases in the world of AI, it’s also flat out immoral. I don’t often use that argument because it can be very subjective, but if you are literally typing in an artist’s name into an AI prompt to make something that directly resembles something that artist would make or has made, you should just pay the artist what they are due. It was their effort that made your AI art possible in the first place, and there is no denying that.
I could keep rambling, but the main point is this: creative works made by AI are a pitfall that organizations should avoid. Not only are there a plethora of moral or ethical reasons one might avoid promoting AI art, there’s also the notion that getting caught using AI art is a surefire way to disconnect with your audience, and maybe even piss them off. Across creative industries, from giants like gaming and publishing, all the way down to independent artists just doing what they love, the disdain for AI is real, and organizations of all sizes should avoid relying on AI for creative work. Depending on the industry, as high as 90 percent of your audience could be vehemently anti-AI. Is that a risk worth taking, just for the privilege of using generic content that won’t even help your brand?
With all this being said, I do actually believe that the Age of AI has and will continue to offer organizations new ways to connect with their audience. In a landscape that is filled with cheap, generic AI slop, you and your organization can stand out by using human-made creative work. Not only will this make your messaging stand out from sheer uniqueness alone, it will also immediately signal to your audience that you care about people, community and planet.
You have the option to support billion-dollar companies that trample over people’s opinions, our legislative process and our environmental health, or you can support real people in real communities.
I don’t believe it is too dramatic to say that your audience will notice your choice, no matter what you choose.