Slop Machine

Find out more

The Slop Machine is an installation that highlights Slop: content generated en masse by AI and endlessly disseminated on social media.

The English word “Slop” has recently come into use to describe the deluge of low-cost, artificial images, sounds, and texts flooding the web. The phenomenon emerged in 2022, when image generation models (Midjourney or Stable Diffusion) and text generation models (such as GPT or Gemini) opened the doors to mass production for the general public.

Slop is the hyper-contemporary visual saturation imposed by AI. With its low-quality content, generated en masse for economic and sometimes political purposes, Slop is rampant on social media. Trump rebuilding Gaza, Elon Musk sand yachting, Jesus in the form of a shrimp, giant babies who can never be fed enough... These decoy videos are everywhere and they go viral.

Slop producers exploit the most common cultural references to produce images that are both repulsive and fascinating. Overwhelmed by the profusion of images, Slop plunges us into a state of exhilarating amusement, disgust, and sometimes paranoia, and each scroll becomes an unconscious investigation into the depths of the worst.

The embodiment of an artificial intelligence model, La Slop Machine provides live, continuous, and vocal commentary on the Slop feeds scrolling across Instagram via its own account on the platform: @slop__machine.

The machine can operate in two modes: automatic and human. When operating in automatic mode, it reacts to Slop on its own, commenting on what it sees and sometimes giving a “like” before moving on to the next Slop, indefinitely.

In human mode, it is up to the viewer to act, to reflect on the nature of Slop and what defines it. To do this, they must decide by pressing the red button (NOT SLOP) or the green button (SLOP), then use the connected ring to click: a single click moves on to the next Slop, while a double click “likes” the content.

To date, there is no taxonomy of Slop images, and the Slop Machine is entirely dedicated to undertaking this categorization work