AI is everywhere. High school and college students are using it to get around having to actually do their homework. Businesses are incorporating it and employees are taking advantage. Forty percent of long-form posts on LinkedIn are written by an LLM, though that’s probably for the best. People are turning to technology for companionship and therapy. Artificially generated pictures and videos are taking over social media, fooling people who haven’t yet learned to assume everything we now see is fake. And now AI is displacing graphic designers, yielding truly awful results in the process.
The appeal is understandable. Within minutes, you can produce an artistic rendering for your next fundraiser or an advertisement for your new restaurant, one which might still be in the red, without spending a dime. But it also pushes us further toward the total ensloppification of all that surrounds us. Graphic designers and copywriters may not be your idea of artists, but consider that some people choose to forgo the “struggling” part and find ways to generate revenue from their passions.
It’s not that AI is totally unusable for such projects. Sometimes it’s fun to generate slop, particularly if you don’t have the artistic talent or budget to generate a ridiculous thumbnail for an enterprise from which you earn no money. Some of the trends on social media, such as the recent fake remake of the “Summer of George” on X, can be genuinely funny. Such uses, though, lean into the fact that the work is fake and terrible.
When it comes to actual marketing and billboards, it’s another cultural loss. AI will never create art such as the Coca-Cola murals of the early 1900s. An LLM cannot look inside itself and produce works like these, from the Apple logo to album covers to Volkswagen ads to the famous failure that is the FedEx logo. Could AI become the next Patrick Nagel? Also, no, though it might be able to imitate him.
Because the models, while getting more complex, are generating, not creating. That’s what is lost in this revolution. Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a mind. To the extent it experiences the world, it does so as it is programmed and as a series of tasks, ones predicated on the biases of the coders who created it and put in the parameters they considered important. It will never see a blank brick wall as a canvas on which to advertise soda. It will never actually see anything.
It doesn’t roam the roads and businesses that real people do, seeing these designs in the wild and experiencing the uncanny valley that’s present even in comparatively high-quality generative works. It can never be authentic or innovative. It is a series of numbers with no morality, no dreams, and no lived ephemera to inform its output, adding color to the end result.
Perhaps we are at peak slop, and businesses, civic organizations, budding entrepreneurs, and school groups will realize that bad, lazy design reflects poorly on whatever it is they’re advertising. Or perhaps things will get worse before they get better. Continually getting worse isn’t an option, though, for life and the world are still beautiful things, ones predicated on tactile experiences and three-dimensional people.
AI is fine for many uses. If you need to visit a series of locations — perhaps a road trip to visit some of those Coca-Cola ghost murals — it’s rather effective in mapping out the most efficient route. A friend who has to do annual reviews for employees who maintain a consistent standard of quality work says ChatGPT is super helpful in rewriting last year’s reviews so that they sound new.
In other words, it’s a cheap personal assistant, quickly completing tasks that one could do on his own, but would rather not take the time to do so when GPT or Claude can handle it for him. But it will never be human. It will never capture the essence of the moment, whether we’re talking about our time spent in caves or the present day. As such, let us lament that we have to discuss this at all and look toward a future in which slop is an artifact, a reminder of a time when we tried to apply the infinite monkey theorem to the world of art.
What we’re displacing with generated imagery is art. It is the poster that ends up in an antique shop or hanging in someone’s garage. We see it as signs on barns as we drive through rural areas — the Mobilgas Pegasus metal beauty or the “Lovely Day for a Guinness” series featuring various animals. Art is the work of people sharing a view of commerce through their own lens, enticing us to share that view along with them, perhaps with a Coke and a smile. It is the gorgeous reality that we need to hold onto in an increasingly ugly digital world.
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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4
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