It’s long been clear to me that I’m the only sane person in the world.
Recently a chappie on X the everything app took a real Monet painting, claimed to have AI-generated it, and asked the Greek chorus to “please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.” Cue the throat-clearing critics ex tempore:
It’s all borked nonsense with no sense of space.
no frame, no sense of the threshold between subject and object, just colors
There’s a certain harshness, no soft blending of colors, no depth, no symbiosis of the elements
Depth, contrast, and cohesion are the most obvious. There’s also no clear focal point.
looks like high school level art 101 work, but not even. no cohesion of elements
The fact that it looks like shit and is shit. Slop. Doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate the style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet’s typical choice of colors. Looks dull.
I’m disappointed i have to even point it out. There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices. The reflection of the tree bleeds into the lilypads with no regard for spatial depth or contrast. The background lilypad-algae amalgam is egregiously vague, like most Al art.
I call it the slop illusion. Its’s what I think about when I see the Grantagate thinkpieces complaining about the sentence:
The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.
It makes no sense, they say! What does it even mean? Obviously this was written by something that has never seen a “sunrise” or a “sink” before, because it’s just bashing the two words together willy-nilly without any thought to how they hang together logically.
Except — it does actually make sense. And while judging a sentence in isolation never tells you much, I’d even call it a good and evocative image! Associating an emerging smile with the rising sun is trivially done; what salvages the simile is placing the natural grandeur of the sunrise at sea over the meagre manmade kitchen (or bathroom) sink. The domestic and the sublime. Is it a metaphor for the ages? No! But it’s clearly not random, and it’s clearly not nonsense.
And so what if it was? Should we hem our language to purely the legible and credible? Should we take that famous French line, “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” and proclaim it void of anything valuable?
Are we just going to keep moving aesthetic goalposts to keep anything AI produces ugly and low-status and meaningliess? What artistic territory does this leave us? Five-hundred instances of the n-word, one after another?
The truth is that if I had read a novel in 2019 written in the style of ChatGPT 5.5, I’d conclude it obnoxious and over-flourished, but nothing more than that — certainly not for me, but but certainly not void of artistry, either, and unsurprising if it were popular among a certain audience. (In fact, I hear they ran this exact experiment under the name “Ocean Vuong.” Zing!)
The truth is that AI art is already scarily good. The truth is that the Commonwealth Prize was well-deserved. The judges have been unjustly ridiculed for not recognizing an AI story — but why? If anything it makes them clearer-eyed about its quality. They don’t suffer from the slop illusion like the rest of us; we’ve been frogboiled, our status circuitry hijacked. We refuse to recognize beauty even when it’s in front of us. We’re making the world uglier for ourselves.
I don’t just say this to renew my contrarian credentials. I used to be worried that AI was going to overtake me as a writer; by now I’ve made my peace with that inevitability. What scares me now is the slop illusion. Aluminum was once more precious than silver or gold — now it constitutes every can of diet coke. As art becomes automatable and abundant, will it likewise lose its luster?
More than a world where beauty belongs to machines, I worry about a world where it doesn’t survive the conquest. Robot Monet ruins Monet. We’ll have Faulkner on the backs of cereal boxes, and we won’t even care.