AI Slop’s Carnival of (Im)possibilities: The Trial of ‘Genuine’ Versus ‘Generated’ Visualities

Abstract

Images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are flooding online and offline spaces with ‘AI Slop', hyperreal and often grotesque and absurdist visualities. Framed predominantly as an existential threat, AI Slop is charged with killing the internet, distorting reality, and accelerating social collapse. Such charges reflect what Mikhail Epstein terms horrology, a civilisation's fear of destruction by its own technological creations, evoked anew with engineered, technical advancements. This article turns such horror on its head by employing Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque alongside Epstein's possibilism, contemplating how AI Slop jestingly inverts the ‘genuine' versus ‘generated' consumption of an image's ‘truth'. When equal parts hyperreal and absurd, how visualities have always, to some degree, been generated by the technologies of seeing is signalled by this inversion. The possible implications of AI Slop's proliferation, within and beyond education, are therefore greater discussions and consideration of the codified ‘generated' ideologies of visualities, which visual scholars have long lamented. In addition to the implication that AI Slop could overturn the recevied ‘truth' that an image can capture a ‘genuine' representation, fostering critical visual literacies within public discourse. This article pairs this dialogue with a series of visualities that operate together to prompt the reader into a visual feast of jesting truth games.