Everyone’s talking about “slop” lately. That’s the new term that captures the unstoppable downward spiral of the web, as Generative A.I. fills it with gibbering text and lifeless variations on popular things.
You can think of many symbols of the Era of Ensloppification. Personally, my mind goes to “Shrimp Jesus,” the weird A.I.-generated variations on the theme of Christ with a body made of huge shrimp that have infested Facebook.
But the pictures of “Shrimp Jesus” have a grassroots component. They are the people’s slop. They have an unintentional greatness that approaches the unintentional greatness of Cecilia Giménez’s viral restoration of Ecce Homo back in 2012 (a.k.a. “Beast Jesus“), which I still remember fondly a decade-plus later.
Elías García Martínez, Ecce Homo (1930), and Cecilia Giménez’s infamous 2012 restoration attempt.
But the drive towards slop goes all the way to the top, to the corporate level. In fact, it’s the slop at the top that is the sloppiest.
It’s this thought that has me still thinking about the clip from Samsung’s “Unpacked” event earlier this month in Paris, an expo where the company shows off new products. Presenter Annika Bizon, whose official title is “Marketing and Omnichannel Director at Samsung Electronics UK & Ireland,” took to the stage to demo all the whizzy new A.I. features of the company’s Galaxy ZFold 6 phone.
The company is really selling its new Gen A.I. tools hard, pushing the phone’s integration with Google’s Gemini A.I. It is very proud of a feature called “Sketch to Image,” where you can sketch the rough outline of a drawing, and the device will spit it back to you as a full illustration.
An example: Bizon shows a stock photo of a perfectly calm Seine at night, the Eiffel Tower glowing in the background. With the “Sketch to Image” autofill function, you can scribble an outline of a boat on the water, and the A.I. will add a fully realized image… of a boat that doesn’t look anything like the boat you wanted!
Yours had smokestacks and a hatch and a pointy bow and was making waves, and the Galaxy ZFold 6 created… some other kind of boat!
Comparison of the two boats created by Samsung’s “Sketchy” feature.
I mean, it’s impressive-ish. But the message of the example is not that this is a tool to help you realize your dream image. The message is that it’s a tool that gives you images you can settle for in place of your dream image.
That’s not the part of the “Unpacked” demo that got people tittering, though. Right after the boat bit, 38 minutes into the presentation, Bizon is showing off how the phone can take photo portraits and “imagine them in different styles.” For instance, it can make a photo look like a sketch, or a watercolor, or a 3D cartoon, or a comic. “You just have to think about how to do it the best!”
Now, you are probably saying to yourself, “Samsung’s big A.I. feature is a novelty photo-filter app from several years ago?”
The answer to that question from Samsung is a hearty, “Look over there—is that Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney?”
And yes, Sweeney is revealed, seated in the crowd with the suits and the tech journos. “We’ve used your portrait to generate a 3-D image,” Bizon tells her from the stage. “Shall we take a look?” And the cutting-edge A.I. artwork is unveiled on the big screen.
Sweeney reacts like a teacher getting a macaroni valentine from the weirdest kid in the class. “Oh, I love it.”
“You look absolutely amazing,” Bizon declares. “Thank you so much for joining us today.”
The entire Sweeney appearance lasts for an inexplicably brief 30 seconds, which makes it feel particularly like a non sequitur. People really enjoyed her reaction online.
And I love the Sydney Sweeney portrait. Because it truly is a bellyflop. And it’s a bellyflop at a pool party to which Samsung invited the real Sydney Sweeney, yelling out to her, “This one’s for you!”, before throwing its gut proudly at the water, arms flung wide open like Shrimp Jesus.
In terms of likeness, you’d do better if you just used the sketch feature and did not use the A.I. features. The A.I. has taken the actress’s famously downturned eyes and corrected them. I sent the 3-D cartoon Sydney Sweeney to StarbyFace.com, my preferred celeb face photo detector. “Sydney Sweeney” was not even one of the possibilities proposed by the site when it analyzed the image…
Screenshot from StarbyFace.com.
Why is the real Sweeney wearing a pink outfit and the A.I. Sweeney wearing a blue one? Why is real Sweeney smiling and the A.I. Sweeney blank-faced? Are they showing off a “Make Me Boring” button? So many questions!
Once again, this was not a live feature demo. Samsung’s team picked these images to represent the best they could do.
The incident definitely seems like an example of how “slop brain” has infected the C-suite. Either the company thinks it actually is offering tools to crank out images that aren’t really meant to be looked at or thought about or liked. Or it’s just so desperate to get on the Gen A.I. hype train that they aren’t thinking about much more than “do an A.I.!”, in which case the A.I. itself is the slop.
Either way, it’s a slop demo. It is Samsung slopifying its brand.
When we look back on this moment of corporate history, I think a great symbol of it will be dead-eyed A.I. Sydney Sweeney. Or Slopney Slopney, as I prefer.