In an ever fragmented, free market economy, any given user of the internet has the potential to become a content creator, exploiting tools at their disposal to create and extract value in different forms and flavors. The generation of memes, images, videos, and reels is a key element of the ‘passive income’ generating machine that we call ‘creator economy’, now exacerbated by AI. Since late 2023, AI tools allow content creators to generate images faster than any living artist with a perceived level of quality. The matter here is, what does quality mean in this context? The use of new technologies is not necessarily detrimental to the creative process, what is detrimental, however, is the full delegation of critical thinking, which is essentially a humanly way of thinking.

In art and design schools, students learn soon enough that producing quality output is not nearly as important as the development of a method which leads you to a consistent, intentional result. This means, going through the process is equally as important as the finished idea. The process is necessary because it it creates the habit of a conscious effort to divert from the first idea. As one of my mentors at my masters degree put it: “Think of ideas as snowflakes—you will have millions of ideas, but if you fail to evolve them and devise a plan to realize them, they will melt as soon as they touch the ground. Back to nothing.” The tricky thing about any sort of creative exercise is developing the expert mind that is able to catch those snowflakes. What generative AI tools do is not granting users with immediate creative expertise, but enable skipping the process that provides a method to evolve ideas altogether. An idea, by itself, never has inherent value—it needs to be evolved through multiple iterations until it can reach a point where it can touch the ground without falling apart, which is never the first idea. When we look at AI slop, we are looking at a perfect prototype of the first idea. What happens, then, when audiences can no longer tell the difference between perfect prototypes and developed ideas?

On one hand, artists and creators are further discouraged from pursuing their creative processes. Members of the creative industry already face enough challenges to pursue their craft; added to the equation of precarious work conditions, low pay, vulnerability towards market trends. Not only do they need to swim against these variables, but they now have to compete with machines that are cheaper and faster. How can they compete? Secondly, by flooding audiences with hyper-fake images that appear completed ideas the narrative between iconography, pop culture and social media is further contaminated by the idea that ‘real’ is irrelevant. In this sense, the surreal becomes a safe harbor. The individual is further pushed into an echo chamber of herself, where her convictions are radicalized in a manner that can never really materialize or be attained.

In the field of robotics and most recently in computer graphics animation, ‘uncanny valley’ was a term first coined in the 1970s by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori, in which he described the eeriness that people experience when interacting with a robot with human-like appearance, but that still denotes artificial gestures or features. This concept started taking traction with the exponential improvements made in the field of robotics and the wide-spread use of physical robots in shops, public spaces, and even households in some countries.

Even though AI tools are not embodied in some form of hardware, they are in the end a kind of robot. Could the concept of the ‘uncanny’ be applied to how audiences perceive hyper-fake AI generated content? A response to the perfectly generic kind of AI generated images is imperfect routine, vulgarity and the surreal. The audience looks for authenticity where there seems to be none, as if attaining ideal beauty through images had been banalized to the point of being considered irrelevant or mundane. A similar thing could happen to the artist, who might seek to push figuration beyond reality, hyperrealism and even abstraction. We can see this trend by looking at works for art which prefer blurred images, exaggerated proportions and a return to the surreal.

When an artist envisions an artwork, they are not necessarily expecting to please the viewer with an outcome. They create from within, a desire to manifest their experiences and emotions onto the world, a desire that cannot exist genuinely within an LLM-based application and must be faked via an elaborate prompt. Economies, markets, and constant pressure to capitalize on any kind of value push us to skip the process, to reach conclusions fast and cheap. What is the point of drowning in perfect images, to the point we don’t even enjoy experiencing images anymore? Who really benefits from generating such amounts of images at such speed? New technologies since art exists, and changed the way humans create constantly. The point is not to simply demonize a tool because it is new, but to question whether if new technologies expand our creativity or hinder it. As of now, from the current state of affairs and the funding behind these tools, I believe it hinders it—we must instead encourage technologies that expand the beauty of human creativity.