I often find the term "AI slop" rather unhelpful. Let me explain what I mean.
I regularly read about numerous people complaining about things without actually critiquing the content itself. For instance, people get outraged over the fact - or what they perceive as the fact - that children's books have been written with the help of "AI." And this fact alone, they argue, is sufficient grounds for outrage.
This raises a question for me: why, exactly? Why should that be a bad thing? If the *content* is good, surely there is no reason to take offense. To me, "slop" would imply that the substantive quality is so poor that it clearly offers no significant value for instance, in terms of reading enjoyment. It does *not*, however, simply mean the mere fact that a machine generated the text.
Conversely: I still remember when many people were shocked that GPT-4, back in the day, could mimic Shakespeare's tone in essays. Intelligence suddenly felt tangible. However, these models have become increasingly smarter, and I currently have no doubt that well-prompted articles or books can be at least just as good as those produced by human authors or scholars. Substantive criticism - criticism of the content itself - should be the standard.
The same applies to AI videos or images. OpenAI's image model 2 set new benchmarks, just as "Nano Banana" did a few months ago. The images can appear so realistic that they are difficult to distinguish from actual photographs. I can understand the criticism when AI-generated images are used for advertising posters - images that were obviously created using a model that is months, if not years, old (DALL-E 3, I'm looking at you). By now, however, the outputs are so good that substantive criticism strikes me as hard to justify - even though the accusation of "slop" is still leveled almost reflexively.
I don't want to be misunderstood: this does not, in turn, mean that everything labeled "AI-generated" is automatically good or valuable. It can be good, but it can also be bad - and much depends on the prompts, the research, or the fact-checking.
However, neither AI music (Suno), AI images (OpenAI Image 2), AI videos (Seedance 2.0), nor AI books—such as children's books written using Claude—are inherently bad simply because they are AI-generated. On the contrary: Criticism must be substantive.
In this respect, the outrage often expressed is frequently nothing more than pure resentment. Criticism is always welcome - but it must be well-founded. And in that regard, I believe that we, as a society, still have a good deal of work to do.
oh and btw. This was 100% written by hand. But that fact doesn't make the text better per se. It depends on its content.
