Last week social media was taken over by a trend of Ghiblification. A flood of images passed through chatgpt’s new image model converting them to the style of Studio Ghibli, a soft friendly flavor of animation. People were quick to lambast the trend as a new era of slop, and a crime against artists. I instead viewed this as a beautiful moment of co-creation on the internet, and a great democratization of craft.
What is slop? Slop is a new term to describe the ubiquity of extremely low effort and in some cases automated media. The images or videos will often slightly emulate some current trend in order to juke social media algorithms. Practically, slop is any low nutrition media designed for cheap mass production.
There is a case to be made that memes/copypasta are the original slop. Part of the virality of memes come from their ability to be quickly remixed, making them great slop fodder. However, the other part of the virality of memes is that they distill a relatable idea into its very essence. When a new meme goes viral there are a handful of people that are able to use it as a vehicle for powerful messages. So mass production does not automatically equal slop, the context provided by the author is much more important.
Today’s media gradient is Art -> Content -> Slop. If we continue with our nutrition metaphor then we must separate the medium from the message. Anything can be art just as anything can be slop. There is slop hanging in the louvre, and there is art posted on 4chan. In the future most of the media you will be exposed to by quantity will be slop, the stuff that sustains you is the content, and the few things that fill your soul are art.
The problem with arguing that a mass production medium can spawn art is that it devalues the craft. If anyone can make art, then what is the motivation for mastery? To paraphrase Pericles, “the story of great people is woven, without symbol, into the fabric of everyday life”. To have a product of your craft assimilated into the AI media engine, is to leave an everlasting mark on the future. I cannot think of a greater reward to those called to create than immortality.
