Here’s my half baked thought on the lorification of Stock images. Forgive me if all of this is kind of obvious! There’s a clear overlap between the (as you said) hyperreality and generalisations made by both stock images and AI images.
I’m trying to think what captioned ‘AI Slop’ memes there are, and im drawing a blank. I say slop, because there are heavily authored genAI memes (eg ‘Presidents Playing Minecraft’, which I guess is its own form of hyper-reality) which aren’t really comparable to the equivalent ‘Stock Image Slop’.
Maybe the internet had its fun with soulless images in 2011? Maybe it’s because AI images are typically ‘one and done’, never to be reused? Maybe we cant humanise the ‘people’ in AI imagery? I suppose our relationship with soulless AI images is more complex than with stock images.
Your comment about how AI images are ‘one and done’ really made it click for me as to why I hate seeing these images on products being sold (aside from the unethicality of it all). To me genAI feels like a toy that is meant to entertain but never produce anything reusable. And it kinda underlines the difference between human-made images and AI-made ones: for the human-made ones the end goal is to create and share, to reuse them in new contexts over and over, to show them to other people, meanwhile for the AI generated ones the end goal is the creation itself, the mere possibility of it. I mean, even the stock photos feel more reusable. Maybe this take is way too subjective, but to me personally, the stock photos feel funny and their uncannines and weirdness is the main reason why they are so fun to me. The whole concept of creating generic stock images is just so absurdly funny.
Sorry for the ramblings, but your comment really got me thinking about the reasons why the stock images and the AI generated images give me very different emotional reactions despite both being generic.
I love both these comments so much and learned from each. The "one-and-done" nature of AI is something that definitely sets it apart from stock photography -- and gives it a kind of relationship to time that is different from other kinds of slop. It may be time to think about different genres or modes of "slop" -- that "slop" may be a category as large as "fiction," and it needs some organization. Maybe there's a post in that.
As to the broader things Alicia is saying, I agree that stock photos are funny because of how absurd they are -- and that AI, somehow, doesn't feel absurd so much as kind of... blatant? excessive? uncanny? There are many words that could work. The stuff about the AI image's point being the creation is great -- and makes me wonder if, because of their singularity, there's maybe some twisted kind of aura that AI slop has.
I like James' points about images being ensouled or not ensouled. In both genres here, we're talking about memes that are on some level about the materials they're made out of -- hide the pain harold being about the "generic" vibe of the platforms, the gaming presidents being about AI and its capabilities -- and how the human doesn't quite fit in, or seem to be considered by them. And the meme is compelling because it imposes the human onto these materials, I think. Thanks for commenting y'all.
Brilliant read as ever!
Here’s my half baked thought on the lorification of Stock images. Forgive me if all of this is kind of obvious! There’s a clear overlap between the (as you said) hyperreality and generalisations made by both stock images and AI images.
I’m trying to think what captioned ‘AI Slop’ memes there are, and im drawing a blank. I say slop, because there are heavily authored genAI memes (eg ‘Presidents Playing Minecraft’, which I guess is its own form of hyper-reality) which aren’t really comparable to the equivalent ‘Stock Image Slop’.
Maybe the internet had its fun with soulless images in 2011? Maybe it’s because AI images are typically ‘one and done’, never to be reused? Maybe we cant humanise the ‘people’ in AI imagery? I suppose our relationship with soulless AI images is more complex than with stock images.
Your comment about how AI images are ‘one and done’ really made it click for me as to why I hate seeing these images on products being sold (aside from the unethicality of it all). To me genAI feels like a toy that is meant to entertain but never produce anything reusable. And it kinda underlines the difference between human-made images and AI-made ones: for the human-made ones the end goal is to create and share, to reuse them in new contexts over and over, to show them to other people, meanwhile for the AI generated ones the end goal is the creation itself, the mere possibility of it. I mean, even the stock photos feel more reusable. Maybe this take is way too subjective, but to me personally, the stock photos feel funny and their uncannines and weirdness is the main reason why they are so fun to me. The whole concept of creating generic stock images is just so absurdly funny.
Sorry for the ramblings, but your comment really got me thinking about the reasons why the stock images and the AI generated images give me very different emotional reactions despite both being generic.
I love both these comments so much and learned from each. The "one-and-done" nature of AI is something that definitely sets it apart from stock photography -- and gives it a kind of relationship to time that is different from other kinds of slop. It may be time to think about different genres or modes of "slop" -- that "slop" may be a category as large as "fiction," and it needs some organization. Maybe there's a post in that.
As to the broader things Alicia is saying, I agree that stock photos are funny because of how absurd they are -- and that AI, somehow, doesn't feel absurd so much as kind of... blatant? excessive? uncanny? There are many words that could work. The stuff about the AI image's point being the creation is great -- and makes me wonder if, because of their singularity, there's maybe some twisted kind of aura that AI slop has.
I like James' points about images being ensouled or not ensouled. In both genres here, we're talking about memes that are on some level about the materials they're made out of -- hide the pain harold being about the "generic" vibe of the platforms, the gaming presidents being about AI and its capabilities -- and how the human doesn't quite fit in, or seem to be considered by them. And the meme is compelling because it imposes the human onto these materials, I think. Thanks for commenting y'all.
Very interesting indeed. Thank you.