AI slop is proliferating on social media at an alarming rate. Images are generated and disseminated with political agendas, particularly in right-wing spheres. These AI-generated images often depict soldiers, sad children, or interior designs. Of particular note are the catfishing-style “I need a husband” posts featuring women with impossible proportions, ostensibly seeking partners. These chimeric creations are bot-driven posts designed to farm engagement, but they also offer a chilling glimpse into AI-driven beauty standards and the lack of diversity in AI-generated women.
Artistic evolution
this work initially started off as a commentary on beauty standards but has evolved after my research led me to find an AI slop alt right pipeline on Facebook. As generative AI is emerging as a fascist aesthetic, I have interwoven all of these themes by contrasting the classical statue aesthetic together with AI slop.
This work has been explored through projection mapping, 3D printing and video works as part of a residency for Centre for Projection Art in Collingwood Victoria. the evolution of this work has enhanced the exploration of the themes of fascism and generative AI. these works are constantly evolving, showing how generative AI is constantly changing.
LoRA generated images
Ai slop catfishing posts reflect a mechanical view of the male gaze. However, an AI cannot truly comprehend the male gaze, and in its attempt to mimic it, it creates beings beyond understanding. This research project aims to analyze the patterns in these images, explore posting methods and engagement, and examine the meaning behind the images. It culminates in a series of works critiquing both the images and their creation and dissemination methods.
The artwork I am working on problematicizes this relationship between real and fake, the generated chimeric women and the relationship between classical sculpture and fascism. I trained a Learn On Reconstruction and Attention model, also known as a LoRA, on this AI slop and set up a production line. In this work I generate figures as marble sculptures, transform them into 3D models, and then manipulate them in Blender and AI video systems or 3D print them. This grotesque imitation of generative AI producing mediocre content is linked to the fascistic fascination with marble sculptures and the inherently misogynistic nature of how these images are generated and disseminated over time. . These works are both a product of the algorithmic gaze and a method for subverting it.
This work will take many forms including video works, sound and 3D printed works. I also intend to create more works with 3D printing, projection mapping and even interaction.
The grotesquerie is deliberate, and the plastic relates not just to the plastic nature of the generated images, but also to the fragility and toxicity of plastic and fascism. These works subvert the male gaze by being deliberately unappealing, raising questions about the ethical implications of using AI to manipulate and control the human form. AI derives its power from the collective choices of users, creating a bottom-up dynamic that makes it more difficult to regulate and control. The artworks show the problems of letting these continue unchecked, challenging the ideas of perfection. Generative AI and fascist ideals both promote a narrow and potentially harmful vision of human perfection. Fascist ideals were aspirational, while AI beauty standards are presented as attainable through technology, making their impact potentially more insidious. This work subverts those ideas of perfection, challenging what perfection means to us and to a world inundated by generative AI.
Paper and talk
Fascist Fascinations
Greek and Roman statuary, captured in marble, embodied godlike perfection. Fascist governments lauded these edifices for celebrating purity, whiteness, and idealized forms. Mussolini’s pallazo della Civilta Italiana, with its 28 travertine marble statues, exemplified this. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, centered on an idealized vision of human potential achieved through willpower and morality, epitomized this concept, often linked to physical prowess and racial superiority, and used to justify violence and discrimination. AI’s new idealizations of Eurocentric beauty and perfection, akin to those of Mussolini and Hitler, mirror these exclusions. AI slop has found a home in right-wing circles, showing idealized forms of Trump, the IDF, and sensationalized natural disasters . Generative AI, with its kitsch and avant-garde nature, combines the two to create a pastiche. Clement Greenberg proposed that kitsch is schlocky and cartoonish, opposing avant-garde modernism. However, John Gantz argued that fascism is inherently both avant-garde and kitsch, making it difficult to separate the two. At its core, AI slop and propaganda are closely entwined, a prime target for fascist exploitation.
“Fascism is always both: avant-garde and kitsch, and it’s difficult to fully divorce one side from the other. The avant-garde abstraction into attractive notions like “power” as such obscures just how ugly and stupid power really looks like in practice” (Ganz 2022)
This work has evolved to become an extended video piece. The video works are being shown at Fed Square Melbourne and Bunjil Place Narre Warren. It will culminate in a showing of projection mapping and 3D printing at Collingwood Yards. Slopocene Icons is about the horrors of AI slop and its ties to fascism. It is unapologetically a work of grotesquerie and destruction
