The Rise and Triumph of the Supersensorium and Slop
Developing high-brow taste as a means of cognitive survival
In 2022, at the Colorado State Fair, Jason Allen submitted this image below in the fair’s annual art competition:
He won the blue-ribbon for digital art. But Allen’s win was tinged with controversy (at least, as much controversy as an event that also hands out awards for best hog or apple pie can warrant).
People were upset because Allen created the image using the A.I. image-generating software, Midjourney. Meaning, he simply typed a prompt into a text box and let a sophisticated silicon mind create the image above.
“I’m not going to apologize for it,” he said. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.”
Maybe he didn’t.
There were no rules that prohibited the use of A.I. But something clearly feels off about this, not exactly fair. Allen may have passed under some kind of technical bar of “not breaking the rules,” but maybe that says more about the rules than it does about anything else. It kind of feels like…
A tech-enthusiast may wave this off as the inevitable progress of culture. Technology amplifies human capabilities and thus alters the various aspects of culture—art included. In the same way that cameras improved upon painted portraits—making pictures more efficient, realistic, and accessible to all, so too does generative A.I. improve upon traditional mediums of art.
If someone were to lament that excavators were making us soft because “real men” of previous generations had to develop strong backs and calloused hands to use shovels, most of us would shrug our shoulders. Whenever new technology emerges, there’s always some whiners and doomsayers.
Isn’t this the same here?
The problem with applying this mode of thinking is that it assumes that art improves to the degree that it becomes easier, more efficient, more democratized.
But does it?
Let’s Start with The ‘Slop’
Allen’s blue-ribbon was in 2022, when image-generating software was still relatively new to popular awareness. It no longer is.
The image Allen created is beautiful. Most now are not.
“Slop” is a term used to describe the deluge of low-grade, obviously-AI-generated images which are now flooding the internet. What does Slop look like? Like this:
Or this:
Or this:
Slop is designed to arrest the most base parts of your psyche so that you stop scrolling and stare at the image, and (hopefully) engage with the post. Look at this sad/cute puppy held by an even sadder/cuter child, wondering why you won’t stop and give them a ‘like.’
Usually, they are housed on massive Facebook pages (run by bots) that prey upon impulses of cutesie-kitsch-schlock, sex, religion, and the absurd.
Ted Gioia recently explained:
Slop is a creative style that emerged around 2023 with the rise of generative AI. Slop art is flat, awkward, stale, listless, and often ridiculous. Slop works are celebrated for their stupidity and clumsiness—which are often amplified by strange juxtapositions of culture memes.
Notice: they are celebrated for their stupidity. The mind-bending computational power of image generation can create pieces of art like Allen’s above…or it can create an image of a grandma riding a chicken, dressed like a chicken, while eating chicken. Which one is going to spread across the internet more? Allen’s image is certainly more beautiful. But it isn’t outrageous or bizarre or grotesque or sexy. It is—as the kids say—mid.
The philosophical dilemma in the film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once was that infinite choice deadens the universe of meaning. If you (seemingly) can have everything, everywhere, all at once, then that means that any one thing doesn’t matter all that much—you can always have another, can always customize, optimize, upgrade, replace. It is a very thinly veiled critique of what the internet has done to us. In the digital world everything is malleable. You can recreate yourself as much as you want. You can find an infinite selection of relationships, experiences, knowledge, and entertainment…with the caveat that it is all flattened on the medium of a screen. But what happens to us in the digital ocean of infinite choice? When the creature comes to believe they have the agency of the Creator?
We get the “lol nothing matters” meme. So why not spin the kaleidoscope of options and laugh at the absurdity it creates? What else is there?
This is why the movie is so bonkers and ridiculous. This is why Bo Burnham wears a ghillie-suit while screaming out Jeffrey Bezos’ name. These works are parodying the parody, exposing what the internet has done to us all.
Slop Till You Drop
Gioia continues onto how this digital Slop boomerangs back onto reality through our own attempts to chase after the A.I. aesthetic that seems to hold people’s attention most easily.
The Slop aesthetic is so pervasive now that even realistic photographs of actual events are staged to resemble AI works.
Consider these images from the recent past. They were NOT created by AI—but they look like they were.
This represents the ultimate triumph of Slop. Human photographers strive to match the ultimate stupidity of generative AI.
Parody eventually becomes reality.1 For instance, there has been a flood of AI Slop generating couches that look like gorillas.
They became so popular, that people began searching how to buy one, and furniture suppliers in China raced to attempt to create them…with disappointing results:
Reality can’t measure up. What happens to us when we become so habituated to the simulacrum of reality that A.I. generates that reality—even when it deliberately attempts to imitate Slop—bores us?
We become like porn-addicts who cannot become excited by real sex. Or children so used to the colors and sparkles of Candy Crush that we don’t want to go outside and play. Real life is just too disappointing.
Enter the Supersensorium
All this reminds me of the thought-provoking long-form essay, “Enter the Supersensorium: The Neuroscientific Case for Art in the Age of Netflix” written by neuroscientist Erik Hoel. This was written in 2019, before Slop was on the scene, but many of his comments dovetail nicely with it. Instead of looking at A.I., Hoel looks at something he calls the Supersensorium.
What is the “Supersensorium”? It is the arena of digital content we all inhabit that relies on “superstimuli,” a kind of sensory overload that hijacks our most primal biological cravings and impulses.
“Porn is a superstimuli,” he writes, “giving access to mates the majority would never see. McDonald’s is a superstimuli of umami, fat, and salt.” Social media, he continues, serves as a form of superstimuli, connecting us to a wider range of relationships that would previously have never been conceptually possible.
And, the media we consume—what he spends the bulk of his 7,000 word essay on—now is a superstimuli. Media that is built with the methodical scrutiny of multi-billion dollar production companies utilizing artificial intelligence, A/B testing, and cognitive psychology to create the perfect cocktail of lighting, color, camera angles, explosions, innuendo, sex, jokes, and messages to create content that will be as palatable and addictive as possible.
Telling a good story doesn’t matter as much as creating as much content as possible that is as hyper-stimulating as possible.
And like porn, and fast-food, and social media, there is a growing awareness that this content may not be good for us. Remember when everyone was watching Tiger King? Was that good for us? The greasy food may taste incredible, but it is slowly killing us.2
In 2018, Nielsen reported that the average American spends eleven hours a day engaged with media…Does anyone believe that this number is going to decrease? The technology that undergirds the supersensorium will only improve. The algorithms will grow more personalized, the experiences will become more salient, and the platforms will get faster in their delivery of content. If this doesn’t seem a problem to you, extrapolate out ten years, when every family has VR goggles in their living room, and then consider ten years after that.
Real Art Is Hard
What Hoel is arguing for in this essay is, on the one hand, to warn people of the danger of a binge-watching lifestyle and, on the other hand, cultivating an aesthetic taste that—in some way—is more judgmental, scrutinizing.
While Hoel admits that this may seem snobbish and elitist, cultivating a more discerning taste may be precisely what we need to not let ourselves become digitally annihilated by the Supersensorium.
Without a belief in some sort of lowbrow-highbrow spectrum of aesthetics, there is no corresponding justification of a spectrum of media consumption habits. Imagine two alien civilizations, both at roughly our own stage of civilization...One is a culture that scoffs at the notion of Art. The other is aesthetically sensitive and even judgmental. Which weathers the storm of the encroaching supersensorium, with its hyper-addictive superstimuli? When the eleven hours a day becomes thirteen, becomes fifteen? A belief in an aesthetic spectrum may be all that keeps a civilization from disappearing up its own brainstem.
In a world of infinite experience, it is the aesthete who is safest, not the ascetic. Abstinence will not work. The only cure for too much fiction is good fiction. Artful fictions are, by their very nature, rare and difficult to produce. In turn, their rarity justifies their existence and promotion. It’s difficult to overeat on caviar alone.
Those last three sentences are well, well worth reflecting on. A key aspect that makes Art valuable is that it is rare. It is rare because it is difficult to produce. And that itself is one of the central aspects that make it valuable. If perfectly cut diamonds were as common as pea-gravel, we wouldn’t set them in engagement rings.
This is Giovanni Strazza’s sculpture “The Veiled Virgin” (c. 1856). Now consider: with hammer, chisel, and file, Strazza was able to create this from a block of stone.
Now, consider this:
In five seconds, I opened ChatGPT and entered this prompt: “Create a photorealistic image that is similar to Giovanni Strazza’s “The Veiled Virgin.”
Which image do you find more valuable? Which is aesthetically more pleasing? And in your judgment, does the difficulty (and therefore rarity) involved in the production of each have anything to do with the value you find in them?
If you evacuate the skill needed to create the masterpiece, you also lose some of the value. This is why many (wrongly) scoff at abstract pieces of art: “Heck, I could make that!”3
You could even insert an argument here for the difficulty of interpreting art contributing to its value—when you discern the meaning of a poem, it is more precious than the same truth would be communicated through prose. Part of the value came from the need to think.
Real Art Expands Us
Hoel again:
Entertainment, etymologically speaking, means “to maintain, to keep someone in a certain frame of mind.” Art, however, changes us. Who hasn’t felt what the French call frisson at the reading of a book, or the watching of a movie? William James called it the same “oceanic feeling” produced by religion. While the empty calories of Entertainment fill our senses, Art expands us. Which is why Art is so often accompanied by the feeling of transcendence, of the sublime. We all know the feeling—it is the warping of the foundations of our experience as we are internally rearranged by the hand of the artist, as if they have reached inside our heads, elbow deep, and, on finding that knot at the center of all brains, yanked us into some new unexplored part of our consciousness.
Alongside its rarity, one aspect of the value of art is that makes us better people— we come to know the world, ourselves, and others more fully in its presence. We are trained to love the true, the good, and the beautiful; we appreciate virtue and are repelled at vice. If that sounds moralising, it’s because it is.
When the composer George Friedric Handel first performed his Messiah, a nobleman hailed the work as “a noble entertainment.”
Handel replied: “My Lord, I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wished to make them better.”4
Art as Immunity
An explicit argument for the necessity of an aesthetic spectrum is anathema to many. It’s easy to attack as moralizing, quixotic, and elitist. But what’s essential for people to understand is that only by upholding Art can we champion the consumption of Art. Which is so desperately needed because only Art is the counterforce judo for Entertainment’s stranglehold in our stone-age brains. And as the latter force gets stronger, we need the former more and more. So in your own habits of consumption, hold on to Art. It will deliver you through this century.
Contemporary Christians would do well to think more seriously about the role of Art in their life. Paul summons all of us:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Philippians 4:8
Read back through that list once more, and consider what your feeds, your watchlists, your Youtube channels are causing you to “think” on and remember: You become what you consume.
Practically, we should reject the aesthetic discipleship of the world (Slop). It is a trojan horse with a philosophical worldview hidden within that is inherently nihilistic and inimical to Christian faith.
Further, we should realize what the Supersensorium is doing to us and become more scrutinizing of the media we consume. Read good books; watch good television; listen to good music; view good art. Is that subjective and open to interpretation? Yea, for sure. But at the bare minimum asking ourselves: is this good for me? might be a not-bad place to start. Here are some questions you could ask.
Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, reflected that in the competing dystopian futures of 1984 and Brave New World, Huxley was closer to the mark. We are not as controlled by fear and power as much as we are controlled by pleasure and stimulation.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
Think of actors or politicians who now intentionally act strange in interviews to try to go viral.
In David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, a movie (“Infinite Jest”) is created that is so entertaining and so captivating that whoever starts watching it will continue to watch the film until they die. It is deployed by a group of terrorists seeking to destabilize the government. Throughout the book, the film is referred to as “the Entertainment.”
No, you probably couldn’t.
From Nancy Pearcey’s, Saving Leonardo
Yes. The answer is good art, good fiction, good music. Yes and amen.
Another great piece, Marc.
Go outside and look at the sky, the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the squirrels. This is the most beautiful art of all. It’s God telling us he loves us.