The rise of GenAI platforms like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Veo3 have brought plenty of creative advancements and eureka moments. They’ve also earned the reasonable ire of artists themselves, who accuse these platforms of scraping the web in order to plagiarize their styles.
But for every slickly produced AI image being used to market ranch dressing, there’s several dozen that fall into the category of “AI slop.” That might be a rendering of a favored politician with absurd, rippling muscles, or cartoon “lawyer joke” that’s a mix of gibberish and surreal poetry.
Cultural critic Max Read, writing in New York magazine in late 2024, summarized AI slop as being “akin to spam…low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet—and beyond.”
There’s a lot of reasons to fear slop. One of them has to do with the cannibalistic nature of LLMs, which are arguably running out of “clean” content to learn from online, and are therefore “ingesting” previously AI-generated assets.
But what if there’s a silver lining to AI slop, however tiny? Might it have some use (or misuse) for art, and for marketing, or for the overlap between them?
If AI assets are still prone to error and hallucination, what happens when you lean into that absurdity? It’s a tactic that Paramount took with a poster for the reboot of goofy 1988 classic The Naked Gun, this time starring Liam Neeson.
While the humor here relies on a specific (and by now, outdated) trope—AI’s notorious difficulty rendering hands with the correct number of fingers—it points to ways in which marketers and creatives can exploit the unpredictability of these platforms.
Arguably, this is a tech-enabled complement to the “weird ad” aesthetic circa 2006–2012, popularized by spots for everything from Skittles to Starburst.
It also aligns with the glitchy, intentionally awkward style pioneered by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, in which error, inconsistency, and technical ineptitude are celebrated, rather than ironed out.
Those who missed the duo’s early experiments on Adult Swim have surely seen some of their later output as commercial directors, most notably with the Michael Cera-starring ‘CeraVe’ spot aired during the 2024 Super Bowl, as well as Wareheim's work for brands like Little Caeser’s.
Meanwhile, contemporary artists have long misused technology, embracing what happens when platforms are pushed to silly limits. One example would be the photographer Lucas Blalock, whose images rely on the faux-naïve usage of Adobe Photoshop.
“Mistakes” that would have lost him gigs as a commercial illustrator or retoucher are instead central to his practice. Indeed, they resemble precursors to our contemporary AI glitches and hallucinations.
It makes sense that anew cohort of creatives is finding ways to leverage GenAI’s limitations and its tendency toward amusing mistakes. Consider this AI-generated masterpiece below, which combines a series of 8-second clips generated by Veo3 into an epic story for the ages. The short film is noteworthy not for how it uses Veo3 to mimic professional video creation tools, but rather for the ways in which it capitalizes on AI's quirks and constraints.
A multi-fingered Liam Neeson is an amusing nod to #AIfails—but given how fast this technology is improving, the angle can seem behind-the-curve instantly.
GenAI video in particular is evolving at a scary-fast pace. Clips made a few months ago may have been rife with humans accidentally morphing into the horse they’re riding, but by the summer of 2025, there’s less to laugh at.
Indeed, we seem close to the sort of political crisis at the center of the recent tech-bro satire, Mountainhead, in which pitch-perfect AI fakery leads to global collapse. Or, less dramatically, toward a world in which AI makes creative assets that can actually compete, minus the obvious fumbles.
Reveling in the glory of AI slop might be a harmless distraction from these wider anxieties—a way to come to terms with a technology we still don’t fully understand (and want to feel in control of, by laughing smugly at its excesses and hallucinations).
