Confessions of a Slopaholic

"As the [new] industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. In vain may our modern Fatuity roar, belch forth all the rumbling wind of its rotund stomach, spew out all the undigested sophisms with which recent philosophy has stuffed it from top to bottom; it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. 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."

- Charles Baudelaire, 1859, on his conviction that the new technology of photography would destroy visual art

When I was a kid, there were always gadgets in the house. My father was a scientist, after all -- much of our money growing up came from his inventions. (And there was probably an Asian fascination with novelty somewhere in there, too.) Massagers, recorders, remotes -- a handful were claimed by some of us, many more were discarded. Which isn't to say that they were wasted. I think I recognize the initial excitement at studying a new system -- once that was mastered, the device itself was detritus.

I ended up going into the arts, not the sciences, but I'd say I never really lost that sort of mechanical curiosity. Chatbots weren't a thing back then, but ELIZA was:

I'm trying to generate a quotation for a blog post.
DID YOU COME TO ME BECAUSE YOU ARE TRYING TO GENERATE A QUOTATION FOR A BLOG POST?
You got it, babe.
WE WERE DISCUSSING YOU – NOT ME.
I mean, accurate.
SAY, DO YOU HAVE ANY PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS?
Who the hell doesn't?
WHY DO YOU ASK?
I'm deflecting.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN DEFLECTING?
Pretty much since I gained the power of speech.
WHAT DOES THAT SUGGEST TO YOU?

I found this fascinating enough that I figured out how to code her from the ground up (in fuckin' BASIC, of all things – thanks, David H. Ahl). The point is that it wasn't just the output that was interesting – it was the underlying mechanism.

Likewise, when COVID hit and I found myself quarantined in a Boston apartment with a precocious toddler, both of us slowly going mad – finding creative ways to translate my one-man shows into streaming multimedia experiences is essentially how I kept my sanity. It wasn't sufficient to open up a Zoom room and stare into a webcam, because then it would just be a stiff, awkward exercise for everyone involved – I felt the need to find ways to use the tech to do something that I couldn't do in person.

So it seems only natural that I was an early adopter when it came to generative AI. At the sci-fi open-mic I hosted, we had a regular who read her generated poetry, built off of her own training data. I was captivated, pitching a Fringe show to a collaborator built around DALL-E long before ChatGPT entered the national conversation (though, alas, nothing came of that one, curse you, lottery gods...)

In a strange way, I've come to feel indebted to AI, as it's become one of my primary sanity-keeping tools for the past several years. I've worked with it on a number of private projects for loved ones, and during that time I've been sniffing around for the right professional project to experiment with, and I think I finally found one, and because of my impeccable fucking sense of timing of course that's happening in the precise moment that the tech has become incredibly controversial in our field...

...so I feel compelled to take a moment to discuss my reasoning here. Not to excuse, because it's practically first-principle for me that curiosity requires no excuse, but I truly do believe that it's a conversation worth having, and I truly do love hearing myself talk, so.

(I do want to observe that, y'know, it's 2026, and like literally every other conversation I think that this conversation has become, on all sides, counter-productively vitriolic. I also want to say that, while of course there's always the ugly groupthink and bullying and piling-on (not to mention a subset of people who seem to be desperately trying to pre-enact the opening scene of the Animatrix), for the most part my colleagues who are alarmed by this tech are arguing in good faith, and while I personally disagree with them they are not fools for being alarmed. This isn't a "stop complaining and buy tickets to my shows" thing – I mean, you obviously shouldn’t support art that you find unethical. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, I'm trying to articulate my position, hopefully Picard-style. Only with, y'know more whiskey.)

So in the interest of that conversation, I'd like to lay out what I understand to be the core criticisms, and my thoughts about them. In escalating order of...well, of how seriously I personally take them:

THE TECHNOLOGY IS ECOLOGICALLY HARMFUL

So, keeping in mind that I'm a layman, not an expert, I'll do my best to lay out my ELI5 understanding of what's happening here.

AI, like nearly all online activity (including, for that matter, this post), is dependent upon data centers. Servers generate heat, and high activity requires water for cooling. As salt is corrosive, the best water for this purpose is clean and potable. Therefore, online activity uses potable water.

It is not quite accurate to make claims like "this many prompts uses this many milliliters of water." We can make general observations about which activities use more of the stuff.

Given these facts, it is my understanding that generative AI is on the low end of water usage. Streaming is much, much – like exponentially – higher. If I sit my kids down in front of a Bluey marathon, while I sit down in front of, say, Midjourney, I have done vastly more environmental harm watching Bluey than I have by generating images of Bluey in a zombie apocalypse.

(And streaming does not hold a candle to the water wasted by, say, meat production. If you've ever eaten a cheeseburger, that dwarfs both activities.)

Likewise, the water used in this process is not destroyed – it's not as though it's teleported into the vacuum of space. It would be more accurate to say that data centers temporarily remove potable water from local sources.

To be clear – this is locally harmful! I completely understand any community that battles a data center being built nearby, and I likely would, as well! This is not, however, something that translates to a national water shortage, which is largely an issue separate from, and predating, the tech.

Moreover, this is a relatively new technology. We've already begun extensive work in closed-loop cooling systems, and I have every reason to believe that this process is going to continue to grow more efficient. Like, if for no other reason than raw greed.

Look, part of my purpose with this post is to steelman the opposition. I'll be frank – I struggle with this one. If you are genuinely concerned about water waste, the specific impact of AI on data centers is very, very far down the list of meaningful impacts. The arguments are far better deployed against a wide variety of other, less vulnerable targets.

THE TECHNOLOGY GENERATES INFERIOR "SLOP"

"...I remember vividly the flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be."

I posit that if I were to hop into HG Wells' time machine, with nothing but the clothes on my back and a bag of McDonald's, and to reach into that bag and place a Big Mac before a human in nearly any place and time in human history, they would regard the feast before them with a Boris-Yeltsin-like awe. It is only in our current utopia of plenty that we can bring ourselves to sneer at it: it's cheap, it's common, for peasants, it's everywhere, it's slop.

I remember how dazzled we all were when the first generations started appearing, and I am not yet jaded. It's not slop – it's a fucking miracle. It can do things no human can do. And, likewise, it is utterly incapable of doing basic things that humans do effortlessly.

I am utterly mystified by how damning some people think pointing this out is. "It makes mistakes no human would ever make!" I mean, yeah, of course it does – because it's not human. Like, this is tautological, surely? The gleeful mockery feels something akin to this – like sneering at a toddler for not drawing shadows correctly. She's fucking four! Of course she can't count fingers! But aren't you impressed by her potential... no? Okay, I guess.

"It's so bad, I can always tell..." No. You can't. I promise you, you can't. What you can spot... is slop. If someone goes to ChatGPT and types in one prompt, the first unedited image they get is the easily recognizable piss-filtered slop. I don't blame people for being annoyed with this, because we're in a moment where that slop is obviously flooding social media, which was already barely useable.

But the reality is that, while slop is what's the most currently visible, the tech is already being used for a hell of a lot more than that. Carefully prompted images, edited in Photoshop alongside hand-drawn material, becomes virtually indistinguishable from something fully human-generated – because at that point it's not fully AI, but a collaboration between gray matter and gray metal. With discipline and a trained eye, AI generation does not supplant human skill, but becomes one more widget in a vast toolbox.

So where, exactly, is that line? Between lazy slop and creative discipline? I'm asserting that that is not clear. And, as someone who has long defended broad definitions and open doors, I'm resistant to building and defending an arbitrary barrier here.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS COSTING SKILLED ARTISTS WORK

...this is undoubtedly true, and I'm not sure how to respond except as I have to so many of these arguments in past decades, which is to continue gesturing urgently at the Candlemakers' Petition.

For my own part, the ethical line I draw is this: if it's something I hired someone to do in the past (or developed on my own), I continue to do so; if it's something I would have pulled an image off the internet for, I'm comfortable generating an AI prompt. Things like Fringe shows or multi-weekend events I design or pay for – a one-night deal, I'm down with talking to a machine. In other words, my own use of the tech is not taking work away from any of the designers I've worked with in the past, or hope to continue to work with in the future – I look forward to continuing to seek out human artists to collaborate with on illustrations for my books, among other things.

(For that matter, the tech simply isn't there yet for specific, complex concepts. If it's a high-profile event, my trust remains in human skill. For now, at least.)

For the show I'm currently working on, I'm developing images to accompany five hours of text. There is no scenario in which I would be hiring teams of artists to churn out literally hundreds of images that will appear for twenty seconds at a time.

Others, of course, must draw their own lines and negotiate with their own consciences (while supplies last).

THE TECHNOLOGY IS TRAINED ON EXISTING WORK WITHOUT THE CREATORS' CONSENT

A while back, one of my boys asked me what a hubcap is. I answered without thinking, then thought. How the hell do I know what a hubcap is? It's not like I learned about it in Introduction to Hubcaps, or like my parents sat down to give me The Talk about Hubcaps. Presumably, this information was acquired – like so much of it is – because I was following an adult around, slinging random questions at them while they absently tossed off responses.

Likewise, how do my children know what a car is? I didn't sit down with them and say "Okay, a car has four wheels, bumpers, mirrors, windows, etc., these are the individual elements that make a car, and objects that exclude these do not possess an essential car-ness." They followed me around, pointed at something, and said "Is that car?" and I responded "Yes, that's a car," or "No, that's a bike," or "No, that's a Pomeranian in a frenzied sexual heat, run," which is essentially what all those "Identify each part of this image that has a traffic light" captchas are doing.

Which is my way of pointing out that Artificial Intelligences are now learning the way Biological ones always have. I have a very hard time seeing training data as equivalent to theft. I trained my own intelligence by reading Orson Scott Card novels in my high school library while skipping Christology classes, and the man never saw a cent from me for it. Was that theft? (I mean, other than from my long-suffering parents' tuition.)

(Likewise, this is why early AIs were so notorious for finger-counting errors. If they actually were just copy-pasting the work of human artists, those errors wouldn’t appear. But the AI is trying to conceptualize what a hand is, and losing track.)

I'm a multimedia spoken-word artist – one of several in the Twin Cities. What that actually means is that we tell stories to an audience alongside a projected slideshow, usually to punctuate what's being said – sometimes there are animations, or scene changes, or funny images, or text that contradicts what's being said in a hopefully amusing way. So here's the open secret – long before the prevalence of AI, where do you think those images came from?

We stole them. We pulled them off of rabbit-hole Google searches and used them without accreditation. This is one of those small-scale, generally shrugged-at crimes in our profession (mainly because these are images that exist in front of our audiences for no more than a few seconds at a time). But claiming that using AI to generate some of these represents theft, but outright stealing is somehow what God intended, is, I think, a dubious argument.

(Likewise, I'm mystified to see some who are cheering on AI bans in art galleries at sci-fi conventions – when you then walk into those same art shows and see artists profiting from the sale of images of copyrighted characters.)

"I did not give consent for my publicly available work to be viewed by a machine intelligence" – it's natural for artists to be protective of their work, of course, but I Think It Goes Deeper Than That™. One emerging trend over the past couple of years on social media has been "If you hold [this particular opinion], unfriend me." This is weird to me, and I think I've pinpointed why – because they're conceptualizing their page as a private space, and asking someone to leave is equivalent to asking a rude guest to leave your home.

But – it isn't a private space. It's a big, messy, public, shared space. So from my point of view, demanding that others unfriend you feels more like walking into the middle of a crowded party and announcing "If you hold [this particular opinion], remove yourself from my presence immediately!" Er – no, if you've got a problem, you can leave.

Which points to what I see as an evolution in how we view who we are, and what we do. For those who live through social media, their online presence is a kind of constant performance, the audience for which they are constantly curating. But, man, I first stepped onto a community theatre stage in December of 1994, and the notion that I would carefully curate my audiences to make sure that there were no, say, fascists or communists in attendance (I am 100% confident that I have performed for both) seems...bizarre to me.

Likewise, the assertion by artists that biological intelligences may learn from their work, but artificial intelligences require their permission to do so, seems like an outgrowth of this philosophy. Once my work is released into the world, I don't believe I should have the authority to bar any specific individual from internalizing it, meat or machine.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS GOING TO MANUFACTURE A NEW INTELLIGENCE THAT WILL KILL US ALL

This is definitely one of the harder ones to wrap my head around, but there are enough smart humans I respect who are saying this that I feel compelled to grapple with it.

What we're talking about here is a technological singularity – a point at which an AI is capable of improving itself more rapidly than humans can do so, and accelerates beyond our comprehension into an AGI superintelligence.

We are really bad at understanding what this means, in the same way that we are really bad at conceptualizing the scale of the universe from looking at the night sky. When we say a "superintelligence," we tend to think of, like, a really smart guy. By definition, we cannot imagine it. It means that it will do things that we can't understand, in the same way that we do things that bacteria can't understand.

This is why some of those paying attention to this are obsessed with things like coherent extrapolated volition. The fear is not that AI will "turn evil" and hate us – the fear is that a superintelligence will be totally indifferent to us. The Dodo bird did not go extinct because we really, really hated Dodo birds [CITATION NEEDED] – they went extinct because we were pursuing our own goals, and did not really care or think about  the consequences to other species on this planet.

"Come, dear, you’re not so wicked as you think. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity."
– George Bernard Shaw, who I'm sure would object to being dragged into this conversation

That said, we have historically been hilariously bad at predicting transformative technologies (y'know, the Mark 13:32 thing). And that said, the fact that the mass extinction of our species is even on the table, and we're arguing about things like graphic designers not getting work, suggests that we are being fundamentally unserious in our approach to this thing.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS GOING TO MAKE US DUMBER

This is...actually a fair point. Teachers at every level have been sounding the alarm about the literacy crisis, and I've taken this seriously enough to have spent the vast bulk of my waking hours for the past several years homeschooling my children.

I'm a writer. (At least, that's what Grok tells me when I beg it to.) More than that, I'm a crabby middle-aged man who fears change. We've created a tool that summarizes text and simulates human writing convincingly, and have made it immediately accessible to every human with an internet connection. It's hard to imagine the results of this not being culturally catastrophic.

Language is the tool we use, not just to communicate, but to conceptualize our shared reality. The struggle is the point. It's supposed to be hard, damn it, and I walked three miles to and from school in four-foot high snow while composing Spenserian sonnets like God intended.

That said, I don't doubt we would all be happier if social media had never been invented, but that's not going to stop me writing and posting this online. I'll compromise by making it far too long for anyone to read. At least, without an AI summary.

BUT OTHER THAN THAT, MRS. LINCOLN, HOW WAS THE PLAY?

When I'm having a disagreement with someone, and they make a series of scattershot arguments of varying degrees of seriousness, I start to suspect that they're evading their own core thesis. And that's a suspicion that's been growing the more I watch this online debate.

So I'm guessing here, but here's my best guess. The sudden ubiquity of the term "slop" represents an underlying anxiety – deep down, we're not so much afraid that what AI generates is slop, as we are afraid that it isn't. We are in our Creator's image, subcreators ourselves, and that's the irreducible spark that makes us unique. If we've successfully created something that can simulate that process, even imperfectly, that's terrifying. Existentially. Not just for us as creative professionals, but, like, for us as a species.

My suspicion is that, like Victor Frankenstein, we are horrified by our child, not because it is unlike us, but because we are afraid that it is too much like us.

"The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."

I'm not confident of this one. It's just a guess.

OF THESE, HOPE

"Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded, and these dangers you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your name adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away, and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly, and returned to their warm fire-sides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! be men, or be more than men."

I'm not an effective accelerationist – there are far too many aspects of the tech that I find alarming to regard it with unmixed wonder.

But where others see apocalypse, I see hope. One day, our species will be destroyed – if not by this, by some other catastrophe, of our own making or otherwise. When that day comes (for of that day and that hour knoweth no man), if we are to remembered at all, I would have us remembered as a valiantly curious species, even to the point of foolhardiness.

Concepts I've been hearing a lot lately are "human," "inhuman," or "anti-human." When faced with an unknown frontier, caution is wise. (I've read Mary Shelley, and I've seen that infamous clip of Elon Musk having a casual evening at home.) But surely the most human response, the best human response, is curiosity, excitement, the passionate hunger for knowledge.

What I have found most dismaying in the response from so many of my colleagues is a near-total lack of curiosity. Like – doesn't any aspect of this fascinate you? On some level, is this not an opportunity to better understand ourselves, to fathom one more corner of our unfathomable universe, to reflect on the nature of intelligence and reason itself? I can't, I can't be alone in this passion, surely?

The nature of the show I'm currently working on is composite. On the one hand, I'm working the way I've always worked, the way that historians and playwrights have worked for thousands of years – the slow, tedious labor of crawling through text, over and over again. (I'm a writer, with a writer's prejudices – I'll confess I find the notion of using AI to help me write to be mystifying. The struggle is the point, it's supposed to be hard, and without that why bother in the first place?)

On the other hand, I'm in constant dialogue with AI to develop the multimedia aspects of the show. And that process is continually exciting my imagination. On some level, it feels to me as though this show, after 250 years, is being illustrated by the collective unconscious of mankind itself – flag and finger glitches and all.

I don't know if it will work, any more than I've known if any idea for any show I've ever had would work. Maybe it'll be an embarrassing failure. I'm taking the approach that I've always taken – that if there's no risk of failure, there's no point in the attempt.

I wonder what its subjects, our founding fathers, would make of this. As with literally every other subject, I imagine they would be fiercely divided. I suspect Franklin would find it fascinating. I am confident that Adams would be horrified.

Since we're talking about the future, it seemed appropriate to give the last word to a starship captain. I considered Captain Picard's closing argument from the AI-centered The Measure of a Man, but this argument seemed important enough for me to bring out the Big Gun:

"They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did - fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars, and then to the nearest star? That's like saying that you wished you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great-grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this. But I'm not, because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk: risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her. You may dissent without prejudice. Do I hear a negative vote?"