Does this new genre have a name yet? Handmade slop? In other words - AI slop-like stuff created by a human being. The artist’s Bluesky post:
So excited to share this illustration I had the pleasure of creating for Bloomberg Businessweek for the article “The Steamy, Magical and Now Very Lucrative Romantasy Business” by Hannah Miller and Madison Muller.
Such a fun one to work on!
Art direction by Chandra Illick.
https://bsky.app/profile/akreon.bsky.social/post/3msy5b3vkl22e
The slop didnt make its own style, it had to amalgamate it from somewhere(s). This human seems to be one of those wheres.
This is why I dislike the ai art investigators on twitter, who often end up harassing and defaming artists that have been ripped off by AI.
That’s just been “pulp novel cover art” for at least 50-60 years, stuff that’s just purely commercial vibe-chasing and churned out in bulk as fast as possible while meeting some bare minimum standard.
I’m sure that artist greatly appreciates you calling their work slop.
Snip off the bottom and share that with people online without context and ask them “What do you think of this AI slop?” I’d bet the typical answer would be “It’s slop. I don’t get it.”
Right, and that’s unfortunate because this doesn’t look like slop IMO.
The signs of slop such as:
- missing limbs/fingers
- out of place artifacting
- garbled text on the signs in the background
Aren’t there.
The only thing it has is a yellow tint because of the lighting and/or the artist’s style. Unless I’m truly missing something looking at this (which is very possible these days). I don’t know anything about this artist, but it’s possible they had this style before AI and theyre a victim of it.
Who knew that people can be primed?
Also, the typical person has a much form as “AI slop” and their opinions are often of little value outside consensus or aggregate.
AI slop definitionally wouldn’t look the way it does if there wasn’t already a bunch of human slop that looked that way.
It’s not a new genre at all. As someone mentioned, pulp covers and magazine ads used to have this kind of superficial, bare-facedly commercial, mass-produced, uninteresting art. Tons of it was made before color photography was cheap enough to reproduce in print, and it makes sense ai slop models itself after the safest, most average form of visual art it has available, and the most massively produced, too. It feels like slop because artistically it kind of is, it appears to have no thought behind it, no engagement with any ideas or wider art movements.
Notice how I haven’t seen anybody making AI art in the style of Chagall or Georgia O’Keefe. Walter Benjamin wrote about this like more than 100 years ago.
AI slopification of art caused by artists that use AI to create ideas and then paint over the AI.
I have another example:
This is Dmon, new Overwatch character.
AI vibes but it’s not AI.
Has Overwatch created a single new player character that isn’t an amalgamation of 1 or 2 previous archetypes? Seems like they created a fence for all the limits of character expression and every subsequent character just fills in the gaps in between the other characters. Maybe that’s good or frugal game design, but it seems boring as fuck. Like with how stingy they were, with OW1 at least, with releasing new stages.
I could be missing something. But everything including the story felt like it was retreading the same ideas over and over.
Juno is pretty great and could’ve been one of the original cast.
Couldn’t fix the hand here to pull at the glove even if AI made most of the layout? Kinda seems like people are just burned out and dont care. I know I don’t. But I’m slopping spreadsheets that my boss doesnt read anyway not making art for games.
She’s not pulling at the glove. It’s pushing an imaginary wrist button that calls her mech. Dva does the same thing, presses an imaginary button on her wrist that doesn’t actually exist to call mech. It’s not AI it just really feels like it because of the lighting and waxy style.
Okay I dont play but wait, thats a real animation and the artists didnt make a simple button there? What? Isnt this made by like Blizzard or something?
Wild, they really did that in the game too, okay.
What makes that slop?
Not being the target audience.
This is way to coherent to be slop and it hardly looks like the kind of midjourney nonsense you might be likening it to.
Dragon slop?
It’s also possible that someone made it with AI and then painted it, which seems like the way people trying to sell AI marketed it to actual artists.
I remember browsing the shelves in the fantasy section of half price books ages ago and being drawn in by the cover art. This is close to those, but it definitely feels very ‘prompt-y’ like someone put the idea to an LLM first, which is sad, I really want to like it.
No cell phones there, I love it
This is the same exact process that led to R*ddit having bots that sound like humans and humans that sound like bots. AI art will converge towards the real thing while real artists will have art styles that converge towards AI art until they meet in the middle just like with humanlike bots and botlike humans.
![This AI slop isn't AI slop. [Info inside]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/c9fc5294-e929-4f07-95ac-cd487dbf4a29.jpeg){kind=link}