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.

So why does this matter to me? I use artificial intelligence in some form or another on the daily. Thing is when you have spent years working with artists, taught yourself to do sketches, got paid to design posters and even developed an interesting in photography, you cannot help but easily identify how unappealing A.I generated media is. Also you cannot help but worry about how their top notch skills are substituted for slop. For example one of the leading stationery brand in Kenya, Karatasi Brand, is using generative images on the cover of their exercise books and social media. Ketepa Tea another leading company used A.I generated media for their Valentine’s Day campaign and it backfired. Many pointed out how the images of the tea bags in the photos they used didn’t even match their own tea bags and people wondered how they were not even able to notice this. These are brands that can pay for creatives to create content for them and maintain the brand they already have. Or does the marketing department think we won’t notice?

My other problem is that we have a large group of social media content consumers who cannot identify A.I generated content. There is the “aunty” who will always forward messages on WhatsApp only for you to point out that it’s fake. Your pointing out of this will be challenged and you might be called the “know it all”. In discussions around A.I regulation I have seen glimpse of suggestions of policies around watermarking A.I generated content as A.I generated content plus need to train consumers to see and understand this labels. I have seen introduction of these “Made with AI” or “AI info” labels.

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.