It's not just that the new mediums of past eras generate emotional responses in us, AKA nostalgia, but that its actually the FLAWS of these mediums that define them. Grainy film, the "crap sound" of 8 bit, CD distortion—Eno frames these as the key nostalgia generators. 2/17

Why should the flaws of a medium be the things we love about it later on? Eno explains: "It’s the sound...of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart... The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer

We love when a new medium is stretched to its limits by the expressive power of an artist. We witness the breaking of limits, which makes us excited. And these excitements become artifacts that generate later nostalgia. 4/17

Many times, artists of a certain era becomes obsessed with limit-pushing distortions, and they become a genre unto themselves. The musical genre Dubstep is a great example of this—where the distortions of base turned up beyond the max become the core instrument. 5/17

What we refer to as AI "Slop" is surely our own era's version of Eno's Ugliness theory—a new medium being stretched into the uncanny valley in ways that are bizarre and ugly, but are quickly becoming the signature that excites us most. 6/17

Some artists, like John Rafman and Daniel Keller, are becoming known for embracing slop as their key paintbrush, much like dubstep musicians of times past. Keller calls this movement "Sloptimism" 7/17

Much like the darkness of dubstep or grainy VHS, looking at slop produces a sort of sinister feeling in the viewer. Why does it make us feel this way? It's best described as "uncanny valley"—where our animal instinct gets triggered by something that looks human, but isn't quite

https://x.com/i/status/1915064... Again, the obvious explanation for this is that AI is attempting to replicate human behavior and it can't quite do it, so our animalistic reaction is fear of something strange and different. But this doesn't quite explain it in full, because AI slop is

So here's another explanation for AI Slop Ugliness Theory rooted in the concept of generation loss. One of the more controversial articles ever written about AI is the below article by sci fi writer Ted Chiang, in which he calls ChatGPT "Lossy Google." 10/17

Generation Loss is what happens when you make a copy of something. When copies are made, the copying machine inevitably cuts corners in replicating the underlying image, music, or video. When it reproduces it, you can see those corners being cut. It's precisely these cut

The more you copy that same thing, the more "lossy" it gets. The more generations, the more loss, the more distortion. The underlying work becomes increasingly unrecognizable until it's lost completely after thousands of generations and replaced with something totally "new."

But there's something interesting about generation loss. It creates a sort of sinister feeling in us, similar to the uncanny valley of AI slop. If you copy a video over and over and over, it doesn't just look "weird" or "blurry"—it looks "scary." It creates a dark emotional

And, per Ugliness Theory, this dark feeling often later becomes reversed into a pleasant bit of nostalgia, e.g. "Deep Fried" memes. The schizo vibe of Deep Fried memes has come to define this era of online culture, even though they're already a throwback to something else.

But we still have an incomplete explanation, because the uncanny valley doesn't explain why generation loss makes us feel weird in the first place. Eno, on the other hand, comes close. There's something about the medium itself being stretched past its limit that causes an

But maybe not because the human is stretching the limits of a new medium, but because when a machine stops being able to deliver a exact replica of a human creation, it fills in the gap with its own voice. Maybe generation loss, AI slop, and distortion-artifacts make us feel

https://x.com/i/status/1915132... Or, maybe it's not cause we're hearing it for the first time. Maybe the message sounds like a threat...because it is one? 17/17