“Slop” Doesn’t Cut It: We Need More Accurate Terms for GenAI Output

Earlier this month, Snail Games put out a widely and justifiably clowned-on genAI trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved‘s Aquatica DLC. Much reporting on the incident, including my own, used some variation of “slop” in the headline.

This has likely been true for some time, but it made me notice that ‘slop’ had evolved from a common adjective into the realm of de facto terminology. If you dislike GenAI, you refer to its output as ‘slop’. It’s become lexi-canonical.

I think we can do better. “Slop” evokes a tepid cylinder of condensed cream of mushroom soup, glumly wibbling in a chipped bowl. When I think of GenAI, I picture something closer to tropical insects laying eggs beneath soft flesh of victims. There’s something parasitical and sinister about flaying the skin of artists who’ve explicitly spoken out against GenAI and then gleefully parading around in that stolen flesh. Slop sounds like Soft sounds like Plop sounds like Globule. It slides down too easy; gets off too lightly.

There are some positives to a term, any term, becoming widely used as ‘slop’ is. It lends the position (e.g disgust and mockery at Thing That Is Shit) a sense of power through consensus in both zeitgeist and Googeist. ‘Slop’ is compact. ‘Slop’ is fun to say; scatologically onomatopoeic in the way it evokes poop or vomit hitting toilet water.

‘Slop’ says: this is formless trash. It has no structure because it lacks intentionality. It nicely captures GenAI’s laughable ineptness, while dismissing it as something of value. It’s evocative and distinct, and I can see why we’ve settled on it. But it’s also a bit too benign for my tastes. As it solidifies into cliche, it runs the risk that all cliches do: it does your thinking for you, pouring meaning into an ice-lolly mould and freezing it in place.

So, because overuse is tantamount to death for both metaphor and satire, I have gathered together some mostly unserious suggestions; alternative terms to reach for when you’re considering trotting out ‘slop’ automatically. While I do not believe any of them adequately capture the many shitty facets of GenAI art, my hope is that each of them at least evoke some facets currently underserved by ‘slop’.

Shit Niblets

When someone shows off their latest uncanny clip, sutured together from shreds of other people’s hard work with rusty pins and greasy string, and claims that they ‘made’ it, I cannot help but imagine someone approaching a governmental agriculture board seeking farming subsidies on the basis that they occasionally find niblets of sweetcorn in their poop. “I’m a farmer!” they declare, their palms proudly outstretched to present their chunky, reeking crop to the assembled board members. “Look at all this corn I grew!”. But you didn’t grow the fucking corn, did you Gary? Someone else grew the corn. You just shoved it into a hole and sat down for a bit. And you didn’t ‘make’ that clip of Studio Ghibli does Severance either, you twat.

Bro’st-modern art

I do not believe it is a coincidence that many people who support this stuff (“the worst people on LinkedIn” as archetype, people that only ever read self-help books then wonder why their souls sit so empty they need so many self-help books in the first place) are the kind of brotastic broheims that find themselves utterly brodazzled by the possibility of being able to do art without engaging in the uncomfortable position of having to make art. The reason? Making art is gay. End product is product (acceptable), process is at best inconvenient, at worst vulnerable. Effete. Unproductive. Very un-bro of you, bro.

Oh, you’re doing a little drawing? You’re studying physicality and form with the aim to grasp a solid set of fundamentals from which to explore new, strange forms and hitherto unrealised horizons? Sounds pretty gay to me bro. You’re researching camera lenses when you could be listening to two men who look like sentient cubes of corned beef rail against seed oil between adverts for pills that make your testicles swell up so big you could slap the actual sun around? Weird, that. Bit sus, actually.

You’re waking up before sunrise to listen to the bird song and catch the dew and maybe write a short poem in the rare serenity granted before the world bursts into cacophonous activity? Bro, that is ice bath time, bro. The only golden hour I want to hear about is one filled with shimmering shitcoins, bro.

Maybe it’s worse than gay. Maybe it’s even degenerate. It’s 2025, bro. Time moves fast; all speed, all fury. Taking fifteen minutes to sketch is basically tantamount to languishing on a chaise longues honking opium from a pipe woven from unicorn pubes. For every second you spend choosing oil paints, one (1) Western civilisation dies. The lionisation of aesthetic beauty as cultural power paired with the denigration of the pursuit of beauty for its own sake? Starting to come around to that whole ‘new aesthetic of fascism‘ idea, honestly.

Cuckoolaid

I’m sorry for how convoluted this is getting, I truly am. Thing is, most parasites have long, awkward latin names. So I have chosen the brood parasitic Cuckoo, then cleverly portman-tied its name to ‘Kool Aid’. The result: cult-like devotion to thieving wankery.

Something that baffles me about incidents such as the recent proliferation of Ghibli themed AI images is this: how can you even bear to think about, let alone enjoy, the work of an artist who you know would despise you for what you’ve done to their creation? If someone in a band gives me a side-eye for dancing badly at a gig, I get so embarrassed I can’t listen to their music for years afterward without cringing.

These shitting images simu-lack a single scrap of flimsy legitimacy that isn’t lifted from the aesthetic touchstones of prior beloved work. Beloved is key here. They are not evocative but reminiscent. Love is required for them to be worth anything, yet love is necessarily absent because they only exist in spite of. Appreciation of the source material is paradoxically both required and fundamentally incompatible with such parasitic vandalism. Do not drink the Cuckoolaid, friend.

Hot Sloppy

To revive the power of ‘slop’, it becomes necessary to defamilarise it with slight enough touch as to not bury its original qualities under semantic tinkering. Thus, I have chosen ‘hot sloppy’ – my favourite horrible term for poop due to its disgusting vividness, evocative discomfort, and for the fact that while ‘slop’ could adequately describe a portion of unappealing though still perfectly edible oatmeal, there is no mistaking ‘hot sloppy’ for anything but pure steaming shite. No notes.

We’re left needing terms for voice-acting specific slop – an issue that’s likely even more relevant to games right now, what with the SAG-AFTRA strikes. Crypto slop could also do with its own special nomenclature. And then there’s games like Paradise that seem to combine every flavour of slop under the sun. I’ve just used ‘slop’ again three times in that paragraph. It’s reign might just be unassailable, after all. Then again, GenAI evangelists say the same the thing about their product. I’ll leave the details to you, anyway. Enjoy being creative! It’s fun when you put the effort in.