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Art and AI: We Don’t Produce Slop, We Produce Chop

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There’s a lot of noise online about AI-generated art being “slop,” lazy, or mass-produced spam. Sometimes rightly so, as in recent cases where generative AI flooded platforms like Medium with low-quality content, triggering major moderation overhauls (as recently reported in Wired) lazy theft, or worse. Some critics call AI artists scum or even evil, throwing around hyperbolic statements like Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki, who once said of AI-generated animation: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself” (IndieWire). Notably he said this back in 2016. But beneath all that froth is a deeper conversation about what art is, how it evolves, and whether artists should fear or embrace change.

When photography was invented, traditional artists were quick to criticise. Charles Baudelaire, poet and art critic, warned : “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.” He also wrote: “this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy” and “a revengeful god has given ear to the prayers of the lazy and talentless. Daguerre (a photographer) was his messiah.” Of course, none of these were about AI—they were all about photography in the 1800s. Paul Delaroche, a respected painter, even declared, “from today, painting is dead.” Both feared photography would ruin real art, arguing it lacked soul and required no talent. And yet, photography went on to become one of the most powerful and respected art forms in the world. History shows us again and again: new tools spark outrage before they spark innovation.

I have several friends who are professional graphic designers. Another friend lectures at University of the Arts London and is a dedicated painter. All of them have embraced AI—not as a shortcut, but as a tool to do more, better, and faster. In fact, AI is already baked into the software they use every day, like Adobe Creative Suite. Real artists are using AI to create more work, make more money, and explore new frontiers.

As a writer, the same is true for me. My output has soared. My productivity is sharper than ever. And while I use ChatGPT, I still write and edit everything myself. It’s all carefully crafted to sound like me.

This is the real power of AI built on large language models. As a linguist, I saw this immediately. An LLM is essentially a vast corpus. And the more you use it, the more of your own voice, style, and thinking you embed into the interaction. The AI grows around you, like a digital exoskeleton, making you stronger.

ChatGPT is mainly built in Python. Fitting, then, that like a python it coils around you. But instead of constricting, it empowers. It gives you an extra mind to bounce ideas off—like a Socratic dialogue. It can create text and images faster than any one human alone, but it still needs the human. It’s a superpower, not a replacement. Also, like a real python, you probably shouldn’t let it fully enclose you or you may find it to be perilous as well! You still need to have your human powers to make it work… think of it more like an instrument perhaps than a snake.

Many artists already understand this. The idea that AI is destroying art because some people are losing money? That’s not the full picture. Those concerns are valid—copyright, attribution, ethical sourcing—but none of them are new. Hip-hop was built on samples long before rights management caught up. In fact, landmark court cases like Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. (1991), where Biz Markie was sued for sampling without clearance, marked a turning point in the legal recognition of sampling as copyright infringement. Later, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (1994) clarified that parody and transformative use could constitute fair use, laying groundwork that still influences music and digital art today. These legal battles show how the industry had to evolve to accommodate new creative tools—just like it’s doing now with AI. And memes? When was the last time you paid Disney a royalty before posting a Baby Yoda meme? I just recently saw a great YouTube video in which I discovered that a lot of Prodigy songs were all made from samples.

This isn’t the death of art. It’s also not the first time we’ve wrestled with questions of plagiarism, inspiration, and intellectual property. These debates are not new, they’re as old as the creative industries themselves. Shakespeare’s originality has long been questioned, with scholars pointing out that he borrowed plots, characters, and even phrasing from older works. John Williams’ iconic Star Wars score has been compared to classical compositions like Holst’s The Planets and Dvořák’s New World Symphony—as Alex Ross notes in The New Yorker, “Williams’s borrowings are always savvy and sure-footed… he paraphrases, alludes, or pays homage rather than copying outright.” More recently, YouTuber hbomberguy released a 4-hour-long critique on plagiarism in internet content, which exploded in popularity, earning around 13 million views within days and over 36 million total at the time of writing. This is just the tip of a vast, nuanced iceberg. That quote so often thrown around—”Good writers borrow, great writers steal”—often attributed to T.S. Eliot, isn’t license to rip people off. It’s a reflection of how influence works. AIs don’t create in a vacuum. They only work if we feed them with inspiration.

So real artists don’t use AI to produce slop, we use it to produce chop.

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