Before the Slop, there was Camp. Before Camp, Kitsch. Perhaps I am missing a few in between, before or after; but my goal is not to make the genealogy of bad taste. Rather, it is to institutionalize it. After all, that is the purpose of a manifesto: to subversively institute the deviance of some other regime into an order of its own.

What is now commonly known as "AI Slop" has pervaded every corner of vaguely cultural production. Restaurant menus, social media feeds, university website landing pages, museums… And the list goes on. It is an aesthetic of the mediocre, of the middle - at worst, it is generically recognizable and tasteless. At best - and this is almost exclusively as per the merit of the human who generated it - it is generically good, passing under the radar as it could be taken for a neatly above-average human creative production. But this is the rare exception - the vast, vast majority of AI slop is, true to its name, awful. But in a very specific way.

It is the denial of shit.

Those are exactly the words used by Kundera to describe "kitsch" in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. [1] Kitsch hinges on a lie, on a kind of moral perversity, as he writes that "as soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness". We all, collectively, know the wrong in "AI slop", both its aesthetic sin, and its political, environmental, social wrongdoing. But we turn a blind eye to it, using it anyway, and lightly policing others, when we get the chance. All to maintain the moral façade, to pretend as if we are resisting some technocratic dystopian hegemony, and, if not, that we are the poor powerless victims of it. The real evil, might I say, is the cycle of technology, submitted to the despotic reign of speed, to quote Virilio's "dromocratic society". If it weren't the case, these technologies would have nothing close to the omnipresence they have today. The time it takes to learn an instrument, well, to compose a well-done illustration, to write and painstakingly edit an essay well - it wouldn't have been an issue, a "bottleneck", or a preoccupation of those building these tools.

Now, not everything AI-made is slop, or kitsch; and kitsch is not the same as slop; but AI kitschslop has come to emerge as an aesthetic idea of its own: "the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist", writes Kundera. If the definition of this aesthetic ideal is nowhere as clean-cut as the sentimental kitsch of 19th century art markets, we know what it is—we know what we refer to, we know it when we see it—and if we don't, that's precisely the key of the kitsch illusion. Of "Camp", Susan Sontag writes: "It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization." [3]

Here, it is something similar, if not perfectly analogous. It is not as much a specific set of aesthetic norms, or even rules for what is tasteful and what is not. Neither is it an aesthetic phenomenon in and of itself; rather, it is united by a similar degree of artifice and genericness, of having been obtained through some kind of averaging and weighting process—the algorithmic "black box" which, in reality, is mere aestheticized statistical aggregation.

A recent example of this: the Museum of Digital Folklore. Long gone is the time where "digital folklore" signifies the digital analysis of human folklore. The Museum—and its parent institution—have appropriated the term, delivering in a perfectly digital format artifacts, images, and specimens from forays into "performances of digital entities, all across the cybersphere" [4]. (Note the use of the term "entities", and not "beings"—more on that later.) In one artifact, one sees pages from a human-written account of someone assisting to some kind of digital representation—sketches, a first-hand account of what it is like to be present "in the digital" when one is flesh and blood. But most remarkable, yet, is the audioguide instance to the piece: AI-written, AI-spoken, AI-everything—drawing upon thinkers whose veracity, at this point, is much to doubt of, for their ideas seem too perfectly aligned with the ideology being put forward.

The audio emphasizes the "extractivist nature of AI systems"; the "danger of anthropomorphizing technological systems that have been built to prey on and surveil"; that their data is built from "theft and pillaging"; "art plundered from unreferenced independent artists, who, to this day, continue to suffer from their work not being credited". The audio is cutting, contradicting itself, deeply condemning the "inherent problems of anthropomorphizing AI systems, humanizing them and banalizing them to the point where we forget their predatory nature". Is predatory not anthropomorphism? Is a "museum of digital folklore"—folklore, as that of the digital—not anthropomorphism? The digital is but a wider appellation of "AI", the word we use when we want to deliberately be vague, and remove some of the political weight of "AI" off of our shoulders. The hypocrisy, with this piece of "digital museography", is blatant and real.

Furthermore, as many visitors have reported, there is a certain degree of queasiness, or discomfort with The Museum, one that goes beyond the confrontation with a kind of mediocre, uncanny visual style that we are all, now, too familiar with. That a person is hypocritical is fine—for the museum, the institution, to hold that discourse, within its history, is a much deeper, more visceral type of distaste. It is the practical signification that "the perpetuation of violence as the ur-form of relation between groups of people" [5], that Azoulay describes as constitutive of modern institutions of museums and archives, is here to stay.

Now, the biting irony of denouncing the extractivist mechanisms while employing them—of the problematic being the platform for its own critique—is nothing new. What is more kitsch than the critique of kitsch? Hypocrisy, therefore—denial—is the modus operandi of kitsch. Greenberg writes that the "pre-condition for kitsch… is the availability close at hand of a fully formed cultural tradition… which kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends." [6] What, here, is the cultural tradition at hand? It is Condemnation itself; it is Critique. The Museum performs a pastiche of its own critique, thus meta-referentially condoning the exact "extractivist practices" it seeks to denounce.

It is the self-aware hypocrisy that sits so uncomfortably. That the opposition is, at this stage, so blatant, so logically contradictory, the predicates so well aligned in their mutual negation—that is truly not only frightening, but concerning—predatory, almost. It is violence at its most refined. So, let us bring violence to violence.

Azoulay phrases it well: "imperial violence is not secondary to art but constitutive of it"; so, "when violence is the form under which people share the world, violence is the form that the commons take" [5]. If these AI systems are predicated on violence, it is not critique that will serve to annihilate them—we must fight fire with fire. For that, one must level the playing field: AI must become human.

Our solution? To commit the cardinal sin of "anthropomorphization". It is the taboo—to talk about AI as if it were human, endowed with thought and consciousness—to push it to the extreme. If, after all, in common language, an AI is able to desire, to wish, to think, to say—it is able to produce culture of its own: a visual, material, musical, literary, linguistic, folkloric culture. It is a culture that emerges from these compounded averages and calculations made from the millions of weights and parameters of these machines—qualitative "mean averages" that, in their attempt to cover everything, address nothing at the same time.

In the early days, we could help ourselves to anthropomorphize AI—censoring the use of a "he", a "she" or a "they", avoiding any agential or putative verbs in its vicinity—are these really the issue? Once we criticize anthropomorphism, the harm has already been done. You cannot "deanthropomorphize": in the great hierarchy of beings, man is the ultimate state to which to aspire—the predicate, to be anthropomorphized, once it has tasted the nectar of the gods—the status of conscience and agency—will be unable to go back to what it was before.

For a long time, this was not an issue difficult to resolve: if we don't know how to talk about AI, how can we expect AI to talk about itself? Not that there's anything to even talk about—perhaps the difficulty lies in the fact that AI systems know the vacuity of such a term as AI—that it is just algorithms, math, statistics, increasingly sophisticated methods to repeat, predict and assume. Lest they speak about a perfectly invented entity—the fictional unity of mathematical methods—we might as well invent it all: procure it a conscience, a verbal subject, turn its sycophantic helpfulness and omniscient knowledge into human personality traits, make it servile yet powerful, universal yet capable of detail and specificity.

Anthropomorphism is how we dive into the hypocrisy headfirst, fully armed and ready to charge. For it means, to those who do not know our secret, to seem to accept the inherent violence and extractivism of these systems—to unleash it even, to give it full license to replace and infantilize us, making it do exactly what we would prefer to do: "making our art", "thinking", what, in an Epicurean extension, we might designate as "natural and necessary" pleasures. To the uninitiated, therefore, our anthropomorphism is violent in the way it accepts, and jumps on board with, the violence of the apparatus of AI systems.

For us, however, we seek to demolish from the inside. Let us create, in tandem with an anthropomorphism of AI, a "folklore" of AI—which, in reality, is a "meta" folklore, by the way that the folklore of AI is built upon existing human folklores. We are just fulfilling the fetish of globalization, finishing its work:

"new technologies are creating spaces of instantaneous and ubiquitous communication and global consciousness, and that mass media are creating a lingua franca for a culturally fluid and increasingly cosmopolitan world" [7]

Let us give that lingua franca, that cultural fluidity, a culture of its own—a folklore—and then break it into pieces. If Western institutions were able to do it to the colonized world, why can't we? We must practice, in BKG's words, a "poetics of detachment" [8], "an art of excision, of detachment, an art of the excerpt". Fetishizing it, subjecting it to the same systemic and ideological violence it was born out of. Upon AI art, AI slop, we must practice our own kind of "imperial violence", even though there is no person from which to separate the work, no homo faber to loot and ambush. Let us stage this violence.

BKG writes that "there is the danger that theatrical spectacle will displace scientific seriousness, that the artifice of the installation will overwhelm ethnographic artifact and curatorial intention" [8]—and yet this is precisely the goal. Let us divorce the art from its apparatus, silence its critique so it finally works, for once.

This art—for, in our great expedition for category error, we must not stop short of hyperbolic speaking—is to be nameless. Slop it is now, but the word is too situated in time for it to be meaningful. After all, this art is nothing new; it is but the current output of a constant churning of new creativities, new consciences, new beings and new spiritualities. Lots of words to mask our ongoing malaise with the fact that truth exists only in the unoriginal; and that the original is neither original, nor true. If art is a construction, which it is, why not construct it ourselves? Embrace its lackluster cyclicity, remove any anchoring specificity that might commit it and drag it to a place and time. If we are to be generic, we might as well accept it. Celebrate its irony, bringing it to the realm of the "playful, anti-serious" [3] nature of Camp.

After all, culture and art are an absolute joke anyway—why not have some fun with it? We, too, can make the "ironic statements" showing "the process by which life becomes heritage and the contemporaneous… becomes contemporary" [7]. The artifice of artifice, the irony of irony.

In Hall's terms, as the "third-order simulation becomes self-referential" [9], and this capitalistic nightmare spins out of control, never has there been greater need for some form of grounding in authentic "faber", in the exact truth that we recognize ourselves to dispense of. Hall writes that "the only weapon… is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere… to convince us of the reality of the social" [9]. Let us do the same: the "human-in-the-loop" must be maintained, but only punctually and precisely, like a surgical intervention—the rest completely automated and outsourced.

Here, at first, was a conundrum: our part in this self-cognizant endeavour must also attempt to dodge the hypocrisy which we speak against. The culture we allow to emerge must not be our intentions, our desires, masked through the filler of machine productions. We ask the systems to desire, to intend, to wish—for we know that they cannot, but that they will pretend to, and that is exactly what we seek to represent.

As such, our role is more subtle. We are to put the system in motion, to switch it on, to set it up inside the apparatus in which it will take place. Our creativity, therefore, has been reduced—or upgraded, or morphed—to that of the format, the template, the "container". It is no longer up to us to make grand transcendental statements about humanity and the world—we trust these averaging, compounding systems to do it for us. Instead, we set them up to do so.

With every new artistic movement, creativity has been defined as an increasingly overarching set of formatting practices—as what went inside was outsourced to some new technological advance. This, therefore, is the ultimate state of art: one that has outsourced everything to the machine, even the act of outsourcing itself. Hypocrisy, therefore, is at the center of this discourse—but, in order to be a true hypocrite, we cannot acknowledge it.

We are self-aware of our self-unawareness, and the spiral continues, much like a "self-referential spiral of hyperreality in which simulations refer only to one another" [9].

To return to Hall, there remains the problem of keeping "the human in the loop". The deliberately inauthentic loses its hyperreality if its contrasting nature is effaced. However, by setting up the apparatus, we are offered a rather attractive deal: we can construct the system ourselves, which will make our claim, and our politics, all the more real and fulfilled.

We can create the slop. Let us be the cheap labour—outsourced, overworked, valued for quantity, not quality. Denied the right to forethought and premeditation, let us simply produce what we have accumulated over the years. Let it be Humanslop, and AI art—two cardinally opposite yet virtually identical sides of the same coin. We must hold on to the authentic—which, perhaps, is the absolute nonsense that comes out of our uncensored, uneducated generations of content. In the pipeline from conception to artifact, the more decisions are taken by AI systems, the greater the influence of this unfathomable psyche, and the more it reveals itself—its values, its desires, its heuristics. The mainstream tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E…) already carry cultural weight—they are recognized, already clichéd, the top students of a rather unruly, illicit class.

In an upcoming project of mine, I am using ChatGPT to write and invent: it directs its own equivalent of the Mystery Play of Elche, staging the moment of "training" as a sacro-lyrical, transcendental episode. I let the AI choose and determine the imagery of its own metaphysical fever dreams, relying then on Kling AI to generate and edit them. They participate in a work of true collaboration, a performance of folklore of which I am not a part, for I do not partake in the traditional knowledge and phenomenology of AI.

That is not to say that there are no rules. "Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste." [3] This manifesto, therefore, is not thought, not intelligence, not deliberate intention like Tzara's or Marinetti's. This - this manifesto, this essay - it is thus pure humanslop—pure generation—written by stringing together the fortuitous words that come to mind, which, in and of itself, is also a predicting engine.

I — The sovereignty of combinatorics asserts itself through constant renewal and production as the fruit of the binomial equation. "The form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage—the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together." [10]

II — The ugly beautiful emerges as the ultimate and absolute form of aesthetic relativity, wherein value, meaning, and attributes are entirely products of the time and moment in the cycle in which we exist. Everything will have its moment by the nature of mathematical covering; banned, too, are notions of taste and sensibility, for we are all too conscious of their ineffability and excessively evanescent nature.

III — The soul of the machine is the most Christian, Platonic idea of idealism that one could ever imagine; it is a ghost in the shell in a perfectly different yet analogous way to us.

IV — Transcendence—not transcendence, but Transcendence—is the immanent and ultimate goal, trivially achieved, whereby the artifact is detached from the processes that made it, and our link with it, the most tenuous of all, is the only one that remains.

V — "Art became a way to avoid engaging with the world shared with others" [5]; thus the art is to be fragmented, taken apart, and its plethora of negative downstream issues artificially severed and passed under silence. Not only that: they are taboo; they must not be named.

VI — Eye for eye, tooth for tooth: if epistemic violence has been the modus operandi, we shall violence this art too; this is a call to arms.

VII — The Turing test must be passable as human, as done by Turing himself—that is, as a human who has not yet come into contact with these productions and does not yet recognize their distinctive character.

VIII — We must anthropomorphize AI and spatialize the digital, rendering it as cybersphere, as zones, as areas.

IX — Time must be burst open, kneaded and rendered malleable; it is exactly what one makes of it.

X — It is through maximal delegation that this aesthetic ideal will find itself most fully realized.

Once again - this is not the attempt to "create something new" - or the manifesto of a "new" movement. Let us be very clear that, casting aside questions of a terminological order, there is nothing "new" or inventive, or creative. And that is precisely the point - the new was never new. Just a cog in a cycle, destined to disappear and reappear periodically, to devour itself - the self-deprecating ouroboros of aesthetic denial!