Images of AI Slop reflect an aesthetic of algorithmic power: the amplified feedback loop of social media and AI, of optimization and prediction. We have not trained our eyes to see this in the image yet, because we are so unaccustomed to the scale of what generative AI does – both within and beyond the images.

If everything is up for grabs, everything is transgressive, and nothing matters much at all. The entire landscape of our visual culture can become subject to a detached, aesthetic disinterest. Everything can be reduced to data to be manipulated. Once you believe that, you can easily come to believe wholesale in the ideological project of AI.

"To be disinterested is to take pleasure 'in the mere representation of the object,' not in its existence." AI is not only disinterested, it is wholly incapable of interest.