britone mwasaru

I was wondering why people enjoyed A.I slop. From time to time, I would come across a mobile phone contact who would post some weird A.I generated video especially of cats talking or babies talking and I would wonder why they don’t find the videos gross and weird. 

Then I came across David Foster Wallace’s famous essay on television, “E Unibus Pluram“, in which he writes:

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Key to me here is this:

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Could this also apply to the current appeal to A.I slop and why it’s got a lot of people generating the slop. According to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/11/10/openai-spending-ai-generated-sora-videos/), Open AI was spending around $15 million per day to run Sora, their A.I video generating platform. That’s a lot of money to let people generate “silly” videos. Wonder what this says about the industry.