Outsmarting AI slop with a desire for the absurd and original

Gen Z-ers have spent their entire online lives being inundated with targeted ads. The pressure they face every time they pop online rivals operations the CIA was doing forty years ago. Meta just settled for (an egregious) $17 billion because it was running psyops on the kids, but the psyops weren’t limited to kids and teens. If you’ve used the internet, you’ve absolutely been an unwitting participant in some of the largest behavioral science studies ever performed, and you’ve also been subject to what big companies have learned from all these studies. Dark patterns, gamification, crippleware, and a whole slew of other legal cons that didn’t even exist a couple of decades ago. The online marketers and money-makers are savvy, and what they’ve become savviest about is slop.

Now a lot of people like slop. Slop has been an engine of the internet economy since the first web ads loaded in a browser and we’ve all clicked on a slide show or two because some herb wanted more clickable content to monetize. Slop also used to be man-made, so there was a limit on how much of it you saw because people have to sleep, eat, and come up with new ideas. Over the last three years the slop has reached a crescendo, thanks to large language models and other AI tools. It is now everywhere. The other night I heard the TikTok robot voice and looked up to the TV to see a supplements commercial entirely generated by AI. After that it was an AI woman telling me about the power of yoga, followed by an AI man telling me to get a gun license now. You cannot use your phone or sit through a handful of commercials without being assaulted by it. 

Humans are clever, though. Like large language models, humans are really good at seeing patterns. With exposure, most humans can spot a camouflaged predator in the forest, and the same skill applies to slop. The sheer volume of slop we’ve been fed these last few years has also made us all very attuned to seeing it. We know (even if we don’t mind) when something is just being made because someone somewhere will get paid. But occasionally people do reject the slop, and increasingly reject it at the theater.

That makes sense too—the movie theater isn’t as cheap as opening up TikTok. It has always been an activity you willfully engage in and spend money on. Unless substances are involved, most people don’t just find themselves sitting in a movie theater like they might sitting on a couch. So when they choose to spend their time in the theater, it’s to see something real. They get enough slop from Instagram, why get it from a multimillion dollar movie about a superhero?

That’s part of why both Supergirl and Masters Of The Universe failed. They weren’t AI slop, by any means, and the latter was actually a delightful film! Yet audiences saw both as cash grabs. Their marketing seemed centered largely around “this is an IP people have historically loved, so join us at the trough!” That might work for children’s films where parents have always loved to chuck a child in the trough, but older audiences are feeding at the trough daily on their phones and TVs. At the theater they want something a little more refined (or at least featuring Zendaya). It doesn’t need to pre-date AI, it just needs to not be slop.