AI Slop Is the New Kitsch
What AI art critics can learn from the history of “bad taste”
What happens when creative work is produced at scale, without the human touch that traditionally defines artistic expression? In recent months, the pejorative term “AI slop” has emerged as a way to label generative AI content deemed low-quality or soulless. This slang first appeared on internet forums around the early 2020s, as image and text generators began flooding platforms with content. Early sightings were on communities like 4chan and Hacker News in 2022, reacting to the first wave of AI art generators. By 2024, the term had gained mainstream traction, with tech commentators such as Simon Willison popularizing “slop” to describe the glut of AI outputs. In essence, AI slop refers to AI-generated media “characterized by an inherent lack of effort, logic, or purpose” – in other words, the digital equivalent of junk. As one journalist explains, “‘slop’ is the advanced iteration of internet spam: low-quality text, videos and images generated by AI”. The phrase evokes pig slop, something dumped en masse with little refinement, and signals contempt for the content’s artistic value.
Online, “AI slop” is invoked by those alarmed at how generative AI is clogging information channels with mediocrity. A Guardian column described the internet “rapidly being overtaken by AI slop,” as algorithms boost bizarre AI-generated images like the infamous “Shrimp Jesus” meme. Social feeds on sites like Facebook and TikTok have been “positively sloshing” with such content. Often these images are engagement bait created for profit, for example, fake “feel-good” posts of injured veterans or prodigious child artists designed to tug heartstrings and rack up clicks. AI slop can also take the form of formulaic blogspam and SEO-driven text that “prioritize[s] speed and quantity over substance and quality”. Observers worry this deluge of auto-generated filler is drowning out authentic human expression.
The term “AI slop” often carries a tone of media criticism and artistic disdain. It tends to be used by artists, writers, and commentators who feel inundated by what they see as meaningless machine-made output. For example, Forbes contributor Dani Di Placido lambasted AI art for “pitting [human artists’] labor against the cheap slop produced by dead machines,” arguing that generative AI only benefits those churning out content “as quickly and cheaply as possible”. Mainstream outlets echoed this skepticism: a Coca-Cola holiday ad made with AI was “slammed as ‘soulless’ and ‘embarrassing’”. One reviewer dismissed it bluntly: “This is such slop”. Such critiques reveal a perception that AI-generated works are derivative and void of the creative spark (“lifeless,” as Di Placido put it). Calling something “AI slop” implicitly denies it the status of true art or meaningful media, placing it in the same bin as spam and junk.
However, attitudes toward AI-generated art are far from unanimous. In online discourse, you’ll find spirited defenses of AI creativity. Proponents argue that “AI art isn’t ‘slop’ and it should be considered real art”, and that dismissing it wholesale is reactionary. In one discussion, a commenter noted that plenty of human-made internet art is “poorly drawn, completely unoriginal, and entirely void of creativity”, yet nobody made a fuss until AI came along. From this perspective, labeling new AI works as “slop” is seen as a bad-faith tactic by those threatened by the technology. Some even flip the narrative: if AI can produce average content at scale, that only raises the bar for human artists to demonstrate what truly creative art can be. Others take a pragmatic view, using “slop” as a neutral descriptor for any low-effort output (whether by AI or human). Even AI enthusiasts admit that if you feed a simplistic prompt into a generator, “you’re very likely to end up with ‘slop’”, whereas skillful, iterative prompting can yield more imaginative results. In short, not every observer believes “AI slop” is an inherent condemnation of the medium. Some see it as a solvable problem of technique or an unfair generalization.
What’s clear is that “AI slop” has become a cultural flash point. The term conveys a fear that AI-generated art and text are overwhelming digital culture with facile, faux-human output. This mirrors long-standing anxieties about authenticity in art: Is creation without human intent real art, or just an imitation? To explore that question, it’s illuminating to consider a much older term of aesthetic derision – one that similarly started as an insult toward low-quality, mass-produced art but has since undergone a complex reappraisal. That term is “kitsch.”
“Kitsch”: From Derision to Reappraisal
Today we might playfully call garden gnomes or velvet paintings kitsch, but the word “kitsch” began as a serious slur in the art world. Originating in late 19th-century Germany, kitsch entered the parlance of Munich art dealers to label “cheap artistic stuff” sold to the masses. The exact etymology is debated. It may derive from the German verb verkitschen (“to make cheap”) or from kitschen (“to collect rubbish from the street”). Either way, by the 1870s, kitsch was a catchword for art that was considered trashy or tawdry. These were the factory-made paintings, sentimental figurines, and gaudy decor pieces churned out for popular consumption as Europe industrialized. Crucially, kitsch wasn’t just bad art; it was artifice targeted at the tastes of the broad public, often imitating the appearance of high art but with watered-down substance.
Throughout the 20th century, “kitsch” was chiefly a derogatory term, used to draw a sharp line between authentic culture and commercialized sentimentality. Writing in 1939, critic Clement Greenberg famously cast kitsch as the antithesis of the avant-garde. Kitsch, he argued, thrives on vicarious experience: it “repackages and stylizes” the familiar achievements of genuine art, offering easy pleasure without intellectual effort. To Greenberg and others, kitsch was a kind of parasite on culture – what one contemporary called “the Anti-Christ” masquerading as art. It feeds on established conventions and “comes to support our basic sentiments and beliefs, not to disturb or question them”. Because it is comforting and easily digestible, kitsch was viewed as the art of the masses in an age of mass production. Theodor Adorno, another mid-century thinker, noted that people seek out such art for “relief” – it’s “patterned and pre-digested” entertainment, providing escape and affirmation rather than challenge. Elite critics looked on this with disdain, seeing kitsch as a symptom of cultural decline in the era of industrial capitalism.
Indeed, the charge against kitsch was often laden with moral and political weight. During the horrors of the 1930s–40s, kitsch was even associated with authoritarian propaganda. Totalitarian regimes, Greenberg observed, could cheaply “ingratiate themselves with their subjects” by encouraging kitsch, rallying the masses with sentimental imagery and patriotic clichés. To defenders of high art, kitsch was not just poor taste; it was a tool of manipulation, reinforcing complacency and conformism. Calling something “kitsch” in this context was a way to enforce cultural boundaries: it marked the work as inauthentic, unchallenging, and unworthy of serious aesthetic consideration. For decades, this pejorative sense of kitsch dominated artistic discourse. If a painting, song, or film was dismissed as kitsch, it meant it was essentially “worthless pretentiousness”. As the Oxford English Dictionary bluntly defined the term, “to kitsch” is “to render worthless”.
Yet over time, the rigid disdain for kitsch began to soften. From the mid-20th century onward, artists and theorists started to reappraise kitsch, sometimes even embracing it. A key turning point came with Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Sontag didn’t exactly rehabilitate kitsch by name, but she introduced camp sensibility, an ironic, playful appreciation of art that’s “so bad it’s good.” This opened the door for enjoying kitschy things with a wink and sophistication. As one scholar put it, Sontag’s camp offered a way to “appreciat[e] kitsch (as well as ‘serious’ art) because of its excessiveness, its overt decoration”. What had been merely bad taste could now be enjoyed knowingly as a cultural experience. This movement to “reclaim the pleasure found in popular arts” signaled that kitsch was no longer the automatic enemy.
By the 1960s and ’70s, the barriers between high art and low kitsch were further eroded by new creative movements. The Pop Art revolution led by figures like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein flatly embraced kitsch imagery. They took mass-produced icons – soup cans, comic strips, pin-up portraits – and presented them as fine art, collapsing the distinction Greenberg had fiercely upheld. In doing so, Pop artists demonstrated that kitsch and avant-garde could coexist. They showed a certain affection for the banal and the commercial. Artists such as Warhol reproduced subject matter drawn from urban/suburban popular culture and commercial life, effectively using kitsch as raw material for art. This trend continued through postmodern art, which often mixes high and low references freely.
In the late 20th and early 21st century, kitsch even became something to celebrate or subvert in its own right. Artists like Jeff Koons built entire careers on elevating kitsch to fine art. Koons’ work gleefully features the gaudy and the sentimental. He has made larger-than-life porcelain statues of Michael Jackson with his pet chimpanzee, balloon animal sculptures in mirror-polished steel, and bouquets of balloon flowers. Initially seen as a provocation, Koons’ “straight-faced celebration of kitsch” ultimately “earned him global notoriety” and made him “the darling of the art world,” as one review noted. In other words, what was once derided as kitsch could now command millions of dollars and retrospectives in major museums. Likewise, in architecture and design, motifs once dismissed as kitschy (neon signs, diner aesthetics, postmodern pastiche) have been re-assessed more fondly in recent decades. Even the term kitsch itself spawned intentional movements: the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, for instance, founded a self-declared “Kitsch movement” in the 1990s, using the label to champion the kind of narrative, sentimental painting that the contemporary art establishment had marginalized.
This isn’t to say that kitsch entirely shed its negative connotations. Traditional critics still use the word to knock art they consider cheaply emotive or pandering. But there is now a well-established countercurrent: academics and artists who analyze kitsch seriously or celebrate it. Philosophers like Tomas Kulka have written at length on kitsch and art, parsing what exactly makes something kitsch. Curators mount exhibitions of vintage kitsch objects, inviting audiences to reflect on their charm and cultural meaning. The result is that kitsch has been, to some extent, legitimized as a subject of discussion and even as an aesthetic choice. In the span of a century, it went from an insult to, at times, a badge of honor. As one journalist noted, we’ve reached an era when “whether loved or reviled, indulged or condemned, kitsch indexes mass-cultural values” and provokes debate. The very qualities once thought to disqualify kitsch from artistic merit – its popularity, its sentimentality, its commercial appeal – became reasons to study it, play with it, or turn it on its head.
Gatekeeping Art: Parallels Between “Slop” and “Kitsch”
Despite arising in very different eras, “AI slop” and “kitsch” serve analogous roles as cultural gatekeeping terms. Both labels are used to dismiss emerging or populist art forms, policing the boundary of what counts as “real” art or quality content. A comparative look reveals striking similarities in how traditional arbiters of taste react to new creative disruptions:
Origins in New Technology: Both terms gained currency during periods of technological upheaval in art. Kitsch emerged with the advent of industrial mass production of art in the 19th century (e.g. cheap color lithographs, factory-made decor). AI slop arose from 21st-century advances in machine learning that enabled automated content creation. In each case, a flood of easily reproducible art challenged the status quo, prompting a backlash from cultural gatekeepers.
Pejorative for Low-Quality Mass Output: Calling something “slop” or “kitsch” implies it is shallow, formulaic, and produced en masse. Early critics of kitsch decried its assembly-line imitation of art, meant for undiscerning mass audiences. Likewise, critics of AI slop see it as “filler” churned out by algorithms for clicks, with quantity over quality. In both cases, the terms carry a connotation of cheapness and lack of authenticity.
Opposition by Elites vs Embrace by Masses: Both terms highlight a gap between elite and popular taste. The very phenomenon of kitsch rested on the fact that if art were judged by sheer popularity, kitsch would win (as noted by Tomas Kulka). But elites viewed that popularity as proof of kitsch’s inferiority. Similarly, AI-generated content quickly found a huge audience, from viral AI images to a surge of AI-written posts, even as established artists and writers derided it as “slop”. The use of these labels often reflects a fear that mass appeal threatens high standards, and so the elite response is to cordon off the new form as illegitimate.
Anxiety about Cultural Degradation: There is a distinct alarmism in both discourses – a sense that the proliferation of these works could “crowd out” or corrupt true culture. Greenberg warned that kitsch was a menace to the integrity of high art. Today’s commentators warn that AI slop is “slowly killing the internet”, displacing human creativity. In both instances, the language of invasion or infection appears (a “rising tide of slop” swamping the web, or kitsch as a “Lucifer” in disguise). Such rhetoric reinforces the boundary: whatever lies beyond (kitsch, slop) is cast as a toxic threat to the sanctity of art and information.
Moral and Emotional Judgments: The disdain in both terms isn’t purely about technique, it’s about a perceived lack of soul. Kitsch was accused of being insincere, meretricious, even “evil” in value, because it peddled easy emotions and clichés. AI slop is routinely called “soulless” and “banal”, because algorithms are seen as incapable of genuine inspiration or depth. Both critiques hinge on the idea that true art requires a human spirit and effort, which kitsch and AI output supposedly mimic but cannot possess.
Given these parallels, one might say “AI slop” is the new “kitsch” – a concept used by incumbents to deride a disruptive force in art. Each term enforces a cultural hierarchy: high vs low, human vs machine, authentic vs fake. And interestingly, in both cases, the targeted art form sparked not only criticism but also reflection and eventual adaptation. Just as kitsch was re-evaluated and to some extent absorbed into the art world, we may see attitudes toward AI art evolve in time.
Already, there are hints of a kitsch-like arc for AI art. Many human artists initially reacted to AI images with revulsion (recall animator Hayao Miyazaki calling an AI demo “an insult to life itself”, a reaction akin to rejecting kitsch’s inauthenticity). Yet, as AI tools improve and artists incorporate them, the outright dismissal may give way to more nuanced views. Some creators are finding that AI can be a tool rather than a replacement, analogous to how early 20th-century artists learned to use photography or prints (once seen as a threat to painting) in their practice. And just as camp and pop art reframed kitsch, we see internet subcultures ironically celebrating AI slop (sharing absurd AI-generated memes with a mix of mockery and affection). The term “AI slop goblin” even popped up as a tongue-in-cheek self-identifier for those who gleefully consume messy AI content, suggesting that what is derided can also be owned and enjoyed in the right context.
Art, Authenticity, and Adaptation
Examining “AI slop” and “kitsch” side by side reveals a repeating pattern in cultural history. When a new form of creation arrives, whether mass-produced sentimental art or algorithm-generated images, the immediate response from many guardians of culture is to declare it “not art”. Derogatory labels like these serve as rhetorical fences, keeping the perceived barbarians (be they dime-store painters or data-driven AIs) outside the gates of artistic legitimacy. The attitudes behind the terms reflect a deep concern for what art ought to be: original, thoughtful, human, and elevating. Kitsch and now AI slop are seen as failing those virtues, and so their rise is met with scorn, satire, even panic.
Yet, history also shows that these boundaries do not remain fixed. Over time, yesterday’s kitsch can be studied with the same earnestness as yesterday’s fine art. The initial rejection can soften into curiosity – even admiration – once the shock of the new fades and creators find meaningful ways to engage with the form. A century ago, few would have predicted that the garish kitsch of commercial art would be openly celebrated in museums, or that scholars would unpack its cultural significance. Likewise, it may be that today’s derided “AI slop” will yield unexpected artistic fruit. Already, we see AI models producing works that some find moving or beautiful, especially when guided by skilled human collaborators. The boundary between AI-assisted and human-made art is likely to blur, just as the boundary between kitsch and art did.
In the end, debates over AI slop and kitsch are debates about where to draw the line between the innovative and the illegitimate, between embracing new creative democracies or defending traditional standards. These terms may be wielded as insults, but they force us to ask: What do we value in art, and why? Both controversies have prompted a reckoning with the role of the artist, the importance of originality, and the impact of technology on culture. As we navigate the age of algorithms, the story of kitsch offers a hopeful reminder that the artistic community can adapt. What starts as “slop” may someday find its place – if not as the new pinnacle of art, then at least as a recognized strand of our ever-evolving cultural tapestry. In the meantime, the critical pushback, the ironic celebrations, and the thoughtful defenses of AI art all indicate that the conversation around AI slop is a vibrant one. Much like the kitsch debate before it, it challenges us to articulate what we believe art should be, and in doing so, it ensures that the augmented world of the future still has room for human judgment, taste, and creativity.
Nice article. I'm terrible at creating AI images, but I'm also terrible with crayons. True artists can produce meaningful works regardless of the medium.
Interesting