I agree. It's a sliding scale with generative AI currently being the lowest point (for now at least, once the dataset is a slop ouroboros, it's only going to spiral downwards). Lazy, corporate filmmaking is bad, but lots of film noir classics were basically pulp movies knocked out to meet demand and are now widely regarded as classics. Because there's a difference between even the most committe overseen, cashgrab product that was still made by a human with their own strengths, tastes and biases vs a genai slop factory.

But my aversion to ai slop has heightened my awareness of it, which in turn has made me notice how many things are slop adjacent. I notice myself writing a message and realsing I'm using a bunch of standard phrases and structures. I'm not an llm, but there are times when our individual responses aren't that different. I look at stock photography, where a complex family dynamic has been reduced to "teen sits on bed looking down, woman gestures angrily" and I realise that we've been traveling down this road for a while now, ai has just cut the brakes.