The word everyone’s using to dismiss an entire generation of creators is borrowed from the same toolkit as every other slur in the English language. Here’s why that matters.
Lloyd Lewis | Art of FACELESS | Feb 2026
I’ve spent the better part of fourteen years building something called The Hollow Circuit, a multimedia project that lives across visual novels, zines, music, 3D modelling, and, yes, AI-assisted production pipelines. I have a PhD in Pharmacology. I have spent decades learning how systems categorise, dismiss, and erase things they don’t understand. So when I tell you that “slop”, that tidy, confident little word that’s become the default response to anything AI-touched, is functioning as a slur, I’m not being provocative for its own sake.
I’m being precise.
The Word Does What Slurs Do
Let’s think about what a slur actually is, stripped of sentiment. It’s not just an insult. It’s a mechanism. It’s a word that categorises someone out of a conversation before they’ve had a chance to speak. It requires no evidence. It requires no engagement with the thing or the person it’s aimed at. It just needs to land.
“Slop” does exactly that.
It is vague enough to apply to anything the speaker doesn’t like. It is confident enough to make the person on the receiving end feel as though the verdict is already in. And it has acquired, in the space of about twelve months, enough cultural momentum that questioning it feels, to many people, like questioning taste itself.
But taste doesn’t have gatekeepers. Taste doesn’t have an in-crowd. Taste doesn’t function as a signal word that says, without saying it: you are not one of us.
“Slop” does all three.
Think about the other words in English that work this way. Think about crip. Think about spaz. Think about retard. Not because they carry the same historical weight, they do, and that’s a different conversation, but because they share the same mechanism. They exist not to describe, but to diminish. To place someone in a category that forecloses the possibility of their work, their voice, or their presence being taken seriously.
That is the lineage “slop” has been slotted into. Whether its users have thought about that or not.
Who Actually Has the Luxury to Care About “Process Purity”?
The argument underneath the slop discourse, the one that rarely gets spoken aloud but sits there, doing the heavy lifting, is about authenticity. About what counts as “real” creative work. About the process. About the sanctity of the human hand on the brush, the human fingers on the keys.
It’s a beautiful argument. It is also, structurally, an argument that almost exclusively benefits people who can afford to make it.
The “purity of the process” requires money. It requires time, the kind of time that comes from not working forty hours a week in a job that has nothing to do with the thing you actually want to make. It requires physical health robust enough to sustain the demands of traditional art-making over years, sometimes decades. And it requires social capital, the connections, the institutional access, the network that gets you in front of the people who decide what gets funded, exhibited, published, heard.
For a working-class creator in Cardiff, or Birmingham, or any city where the creative industries are something you watch on television rather than participate in, AI tools don’t represent a threat to some sacred tradition. They represent the first genuine opportunity to make the thing that’s been in their head for a decade.
For a disabled artist, someone whose hands won’t cooperate, whose body has already decided it’s not going to play the game the way the industry expects, these tools are not a shortcut. They are a lifeline. They are the difference between “I can make this” and “I will never be able to make this.”
When someone dismisses that work as “slop”, dismisses it without looking, without engaging, without a single moment of genuine curiosity about the process that produced it, they are not making a cultural observation. They are drawing a line. And the line falls, as it almost always does, between those who already have access and those who don’t.
The “Easy Button” Myth Is the Most Dishonest Part of This
The persistent claim is that AI tools make great creative work easy. One click. Instant output. No skill, no vision, no labour required.
It’s wrong. And it’s wrong in a way that reveals exactly how little the people making the claim have actually engaged with these tools at any serious level.
Yes, generating generic, soulless, algorithmically average output with AI is easy. Nobody here is going to defend that. It’s everywhere, it’s obvious, and it’s rubbish. But here’s the thing that never gets acknowledged: generating generic, soulless, derivative output with traditional tools is also easy. A boring watercolour is still a boring watercolour. A forgettable photograph is still a forgettable photograph. Mediocrity has never required sophisticated equipment to produce.
What is difficult, genuinely, grindingly difficult, is making something good with these tools. Something that has a specific aesthetic. A specific vision. Something that couldn’t have been made any other way, at any other scale, in any other lifetime.
I know this because I do it. The production pipelines we use at epicFAIL#, the label and IP defence platform running out of Art of FACELESS, involve hundreds of iterations. Technical troubleshooting at three in the morning. Dozens of tool chains, dozens of outputs, dozens of failures before you land on the one frame, the one sequence, the one image that actually does what you need it to do. The 3D models are hand-made in Reallusion. The rendering passes through Nano Banana. The compositing happens in Photoshop on an iPad. The music is produced in Logic Pro. None of this is “one click.”
When someone calls this process “lazy,” they are telling you something about themselves. They have never pushed these tools past the surface. They have confused the tool with the talent, and mistaken their own lack of engagement for a universal truth about everyone else.
The Weaponisation Problem
“Slop” has become what linguists might call a signal term, a word whose primary function is social rather than descriptive. Using it doesn’t communicate a considered position about AI-generated content. It communicates membership. It says: I am aware. I am on the correct side of this. I am part of the conversation that matters.
This is how groupthink propagates. Not through careful argument, but through words that feel right to use, that carry no risk, and that require no thought.
And the structural effect of that groupthink is not, as its participants probably imagine, the protection of artistic integrity. It is the pitting of creator against creator. It is a distraction, a remarkably effective one, that keeps working creatives arguing about legitimacy and process while the traditional industry structures that actually control the money, the distribution, and the narrative continue to hollow out quietly in the background.
Nobody’s looking at that collapse. They’re too busy arguing about whether a diffusion model counts as real art.
By labelling new methods as slop, critics are, consciously or not, attempting to shame an entire generation of creatives into staying in their designated place. Into not experimenting. Into not pushing the tools further. Into behaving, in short, themselves.
The Aronofsky Moment
The point at which this tipped from cultural noise into something worth writing about, at least for me, was when Darren Aronofsky announced his AI-assisted revolutionary war series, and The Guardian’s response was less analysis and more a vituperative shouting match dressed up as commentary.
I read that piece. I read it carefully. It didn’t engage with the themes of the project. It didn’t interrogate the visual language or the narrative ambition or what it might mean that a filmmaker of Aronofsky’s calibre was choosing to work with these tools. It was stripped of its broadsheet formatting and its cultural authority, abused.
It was the sound of a gatekeeper realising the gate had been kicked off its hinges. And rather than examining what that might mean, for storytelling, for access, for the industry itself, the response was to shout louder.
That tells you everything you need to know about where the “slop” discourse actually lives. It is not a conversation. It is a defence mechanism.
What’s Actually Happening Here
The status quo is afraid. That’s not a metaphor. It is the plainest possible description of what is happening when established cultural institutions and their associated commentariat encounter tools that fundamentally destabilise their authority over what gets made, what gets seen, and who gets to make it.
Every significant technological shift in creative production has provoked this exact response. Film vs. photography. Digital post-production vs. chemical darkroom work. Samplers and synthesisers vs. acoustic instruments. Logic Pro vs. the recording studio. Each time, the people who had built their identity and their income on mastery of the previous system predicted the death of authenticity. Each time, they were wrong. Not because the new tools were perfect. They weren’t. But because the tools expanded the space of what was possible, and some of the people who picked them up had things to say that the old systems would never have let them say.
That is what is happening now. And the word “slop” is the latest in a long line of attempts to close the door before it opens fully.
A Note on Transparency
I want to be clear about something, because it matters for the credibility of this argument. Art of FACELESS documents everything. Every tool chain. Every iteration. Every process step. The work we produce under epicFAIL# and The Hollow Circuit™ is not presented as something conjured from nothing. It is presented with full provenance, because provenance is the answer to the slop question, every single time.
If the concern is that AI-generated work is indistinguishable from human-made work, the solution is not to ban the tools. The solution is transparency. Documentation. Showing your working, as it were. That is what we do. That is what any serious practitioner using these tools should be doing.
The people shouting “slop” are not asking for transparency. They are not asking for documentation, provenance, or process disclosure. They are asking for the work not to exist.
That is not a critical position. It is a gatekeeping one.
Re. Comments
If you disagree with this, genuinely, substantively disagree, I am not interested in shutting that down. Bring the argument. Bring an actual engagement with the work, the process, the tools, the economics of who gets to make what, and why. Bring something other than the word itself, deployed as a full stop.
But if the argument is simply that you don’t like how it looks, or that it feels wrong, or that something about the texture of AI-assisted work makes you uncomfortable, that is a feeling, not a position. And feelings, however valid, do not get to determine who is allowed to create.
The Hollow Circuit has been in development for fourteen years. epicFAIL# was built in direct response to systematic IP theft by AI content farms. The work is documented, timestamped, and open for inspection.
It exists. It is not going anywhere. And it was not made by a shortcut.
Lloyd Lewis is a multimedia artist and researcher and the creator of Art of FACELESS. The Hollow Circuit™ is a 14-year transmedia project. epicFAIL#™ is an independent label and IP defence platform. www.artoffaceless.com.