make bad art
I recently encountered someone on Bluesky making the following take:
It's weird how there's been a backlash against "slop" without a corresponding revival in high culture. I see approximately 60,000 posts bemoaning "slop" for every post about opera or ballet or literature above the YA level.1
In their followup post they sneeringly note, "Yes, Patrick, Andor is still a Star War." It's not real art--not the kind of art that, in the poster's apparent opinion, will save us from the waves of slop. You're liking the wrong kinds of art.
My very first reaction was to say, out loud, "fuck that shit." Ivory tower elitism will not fucking save you. The slop tide is rising and buddy, your shit ain't waterproof.
There is nothing wrong with "high art", of course2. I've spent over ten years studying classical French foil; I get it, all right? I love when humans spend some of their finite time on this earth mastering a skill for no other reason than that it is beautiful. One of my very oldest friends in this vale of tears has dedicated her life to ballet and that is a beautiful thing. Humans are capable of amazing things, but we cannot allow ourselves to think that only the art of these humans matter.
No, my issue is with the sneering contempt for lesser art forms. The implication is that surely if we all throw our punk CDs in the trash and listen exclusively to opera henceforth, we will be immune to AI slop, because surely the robots will never be able to emulate high art. It is a sign of your art's inferiority, the elitists will tell you, that it can be emulated by the plagiarism engines.3
This attitude tells us that only certain art is valid, only certain art is worthy, only certain art has value; it hopes to retreat into our ivory towers and lock the doors and raise the drawbridges and hope that at the end of the day when all the lesser art has been burned out of the countryside, the "high art" will be able to come out and lead us all to an enlightened future. This is, of course, effectively a strategy of surrender. This is, as The Long Winters described it, "training for the big race by hoping the runners will die." There is no future in this approach.
I've been thinking a lot about punk as an ethos recently. It's always been with me--the first real concert I went to was a punk show at the Vera Project in Seattle, forever ago--but lately it's come to the forefront, and I'm thinking about how much power there is in a movement which doesn't care if you're "good". All you need is three chords and a guitar and the desire to go tell the truth. That's it. That's enough. No one cares if you do it right, you just have to go out there and do it.
The best part about this sort of DIY ethos is it's viral. Making art appeals to some primal part of our beings; there is nothing that feels better than going out there and creating something, loudly and unapologetically. Art is play; art is expressing your soul; art is connection. And this is what makes what humans make valuable; not that it's more aesthetically pleasing than what the slop armies can produce, but because it is human. Every bad drawing, every shitty haiku, every poem that doesn't scan, every stupid melody we hum to our cats, is participating in the great conversation that has been ongoing since we started telling each other stories and painting in caves.
One of the things that I have often heard as an excuse for the AI slopmongers is something like "oh, well, what about people with aphantasia? They can't draw, maybe they need the AI to create visual art if they want to." The thing is, I have aphantasia, and I find the very notion revolting.4 So starting with the dawn of the new year I've been teaching myself to draw. Three months in and I'm pretty happy with my progress.
Because this is how we win: get out there and make bad art. Write a poem just for fun. Be loud and unapologetic; make that fucking noise. Participate in the joyful experiment that is art: creating it, sharing it, experiencing it. Look for cool artists and follow them, tell them they rule, share it with your friends. Make bad art. There is so much beauty out there, being made by real humans, as messy and complicated and diverse as humans are. Celebrate that. Never stop celebrating that. The slopmongers are powerless against our joy.
Obviously, don't track this person down and harass them.↩
Except that it's called "high art". Fuck that.↩
This is, incidentally, a failing rhetorical strategy on top of being abhorrent to me ideologically. If you base your criticisms of the plagiarism engines on aesthetics, your rhetoric falls apart entirely when the machine no longer fails aesthetically.↩
This must really suck for these AI apologists. Hopefully they can find someone else to disingenuously use as a prop.↩