I think you fundamentally misunderstand what people use "slop" to describe.

> Most human made art is slop too.

I'm assuming you're using the term "slop" to describe low-quality, unpolished works, or works where the artist has been too ambitious with their skill level.

Let me put it this way:

Every piece of art that is made, is a series of decisions. The artist uses their lived experience, their tastes and their values to create something that's meaningful to them. Art doesn't need to have a high-level of technical expertise to be meaningful to others. It's fundamentally about communication from artists to their audience. To this point, I don't believe there's such a thing as "bad art" (all works have something to say about the artist!).

In contrast, when you prompt an image generator, you're handing over the majority of the decisions to the algorithm. You can put in your subject matter, poses, even add styles, but how much is really being communicated here? Undoubtedly it would require a high level of technical skill to render similarly by hand, but that's missing the forest for the trees- what is the image saying? There's a reason why most "good" AI-generated images generally have a lot of human curation and editing.

Here's an example of some "slop" from the AI Art Turing Test (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar...) from a while back: https://i.imgur.com/RAMFKP1.jpeg There's definitely a high level of technical expertise that a human would require to paint something like this. But it's very clearly AI-generated. Can you figure out why?

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As a side note, here's a human-made piece that I appreciate a lot. https://i.imgur.com/AZiiZj1.jpeg The longer you explore it, the more the story unfolds, it's quite lovely. On the other hand, when I focus on the details in AI-generated works, there's not much else to see.