Lecture Four - AI Slop: Post-Truth Digital Subjectivity

Lecture Four - AI Slop: Post-truth Digital Subjectivity
By Paul Sutherland

21st of July 6PM
Clancy's Fish Pub

Within the space of three years, Generative AI had rapidly evolved from novel proofs of concept to a cultural saturation point where its usage in workplaces, schools, traditional media, and digital platforms seems inescapable.

ChatGPT is being used as an assignment writer by some, and an oracle or therapist by others. AI generated images, despite often depicting far-fetched scenarios, are becoming increasingly photo-realistic and have been published by numerous traditional media outlets around the world, featured in political campaigns, and disseminated prolifically enough online that a whole new pejorative term has emerged to describe it—AI Slop. The pejorative nature of this term is clearly at odds with the effortlessness of its proliferation and its apparent wider cultural embrace.

This presentation examines why AI Slop became so widely normalised, situating it within the broader media conditions that enabled the ‘post-truth’ era to emerge. It argues that the post-truth era, where the factuality of information becomes less relevant to people than its affective resonance, precisely provides the right environment for AI Slop to be culturally accepted, and, in turn, AI Slop has become the hallmark aesthetic of the post-truth era.

45-60min + Q&A

See you there
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You may also like the following events from Perth Philosophy Circle:

• Next month, 21st July, 06:00 pm, A Crisis of Thinking: Reflections on a Fractured World in Fremantle

Also check out other Arts events in Fremantle, Literary Art events in Fremantle.