Never Mind the AI Slop, What About the Human Slop?

I hear a lot of whining about ‘AI slop’, particularly on social media, amongst the would-be artistic types who use the alleged prevalence of AI generated content to account for their own lack of success. I’ve news for you guys: your lack of creative success has nothing to do with AI – it’s more likely down to your own lack of talent. There’s a reason why the overwhelming majority of the books and scripts that half of Bluesky claim in their profiles to be working on, will never see the light of day – they’re shit. In fact, they’re very much the human equivalent of ‘AI Slop’. As is most of the human produced content I encounter online. Particularly on You Tube. I encounter a lot of non-AI, human generated slop there.  Some of it actually quite sinister.  You know the sort of stuff I mean: those videos, framed as nostalgia, going on about how much better Britain was way-back-when and how we need to get back to those good old fashioned conservative values.  The right-wing propaganda undertones should be obvious to a blind, deaf and dumb person it is so blatant. Politics aside, most of these are clearly not AI generated – they lack the slickness of the contemporary AI product. They are the same sort of poorly conceived and executed pieces that have been cluttering up the web since its inception – and it is the people who create this crap who are doubtless shouting loudest about ‘AI Slop’ as it is threatening to put their ‘Human Slop’ out of business.

Because that’s the thing about all those AI generated articles and videos that are allegedly flooding the web now – they are no different to the human produced crap from a few years ago which flooded the web. I remember, back in the day, when people started thinking that they could make a quick buck by monetising very basic websites with ads – they didn’t care much what the content was, so long as they could surround it with ads. Not surprisingly, a whole army of ‘creators’ of slop to sit between the ads appeared, software was developed and sold to ‘spin’ web stories into ‘new’ articles. Pretty quickly, this avalanche of shit overwhelmed the relatively small amount of quality material on the web – in search engines, directories and aggregators. All that’s changed is that a smaller number of these characters have used AI to automate the shit-producing to an even greater degree. It really doesn’t matter who is making the crap or how, the effect is the same: it stinks out the whole web. Yet we’re apparently meant to protest the demise of that handcrafted ‘Human Slop’ at the hands of AI. Look, the AI produced stuff is at least a lot slicker and more professional looking than the old stuff. Which, I suppose, is progress of a kind.

But hey, anything produced using AI is automatically bad, right? It stifles creativity, right? AI is the devil’s work, right? This is pretty much the level of discourse on social media, regarding the use of AI in any creative project. Indeed, increasingly, in social media, I keep seeing truly ridiculous overreactions to any kind of AI-originated creative work – you’d think that we really were talking about the works of the devil, such is the extremity and vehemence of the commentary.  At the very least, it is dismissed as ‘slop’ that is undermining ‘true creativity’.  Most reactions are more extreme.  I was, for example, struck by the sheer unpleasantness of the reactions to a user of an online music community who had had their entire library of work deleted after adding some new music they had created with AI assistance – ‘good’, ‘serves them right’ were the mildest reactions, with absolutely no sympathy amongst the vituperative gloating over their downfall.  ‘Oh come on’, was my reaction, ‘It isn’t as if this person hadn’t been creating original material without AI for years, but decide to experiment with it as a creative tool or aid and they are suddenly possessed by the devil and condemned to eternal damnation?’

Because, at the end of the day, that’s all that AI in its current form is: a tool which can be used to aid the creative process.  If we are to condemn people for using it creatively, then we might as well also condemn artists for using brushes instead of their fingers, or musicians for using instruments instead of just clapping their hands.  OK, I can’t deny that I have a dog in this fight, so to speak – I make use of AI for various creative tasks I don’t have the skills to carry out myself.  You’ve doubtless noticed that here at The Sleaze I make extensive use of images I created using AI to illustrate the stories.  I have no artistic abilities myself, but I know what I want to create in terms of imagery.  AI allows me to do that. It also gets me over the potential hurdle of copyright claims on any image I use, (even the royalty-free images available from many sites are fraught with peril, as their originators could change their licensing terms at any time, without warning, leaving users of them vulnerable to copyright claims).  Do they have any artistic merit?  Clearly not, but that’s not the point.  They exist simply to illustrate the story, which was written by a human – me.  Luckily, I haven’t had any kickback about these images, but some other AI artwork I devised – a series of satirical fake sixties comic book covers – drew all sorts of anti-AI commentary when I published them on my Tumblr blog last year.  There was an implication that they somehow represented some form of deception.  In the end, a terse footnote I put on the last one – to the effect that they were clearly not real and a joke and created by AI because I wasn’t going to pay a real artist just for the sake of illustrating a comic idea that I’m making no money from – seems of cut off this line of ‘criticism’ entirely.

Right now, I’m producing the ‘After Hours’ series of podcasts, on which I’ve used AI created voices from several AI assisted TTS systems.  I’ve done similar stuff before, both complete podcasts and inserts to otherwise human podcasts.  But this time around, the tools used are, in general, more sophisticated and more realistic sounding.  Doubtless, there will be many who won’t like this but, as before, I’m a one man band putting my creative work out for free, so I’m hardly going to employ a bunch of actors to enact my scripts, am I?  And that’s the point – the ‘actors’ in this podcast might be created by AI, but the words they speak are written entirely by a human – me.  The structure of the podcast – again, all me, as are all the ideas and characters.  AI is simply being used as a creative tool.  With it, I can create a far more sophisticated piece of audio than I’d be able to just working on my own, with only my voice.  So, while I’m as wary as anyone regarding the hype surrounding AI and the many dubious uses politicians and corporations are trying to put it to, as an individual creator, I’m also quite happy to embrace those aspects of it that I can put to use as a tool.  Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to AI.

Doc Sleaze