cielak
NanoraptorI think every one of the last dozen photoshops I’ve done has had some knob or another reply with “AI SLOP!!”.
Look. Skill issue. You may not be able to hallucinate absolute dorkarse nonsense by yourself, but some of us can.
Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️⚧️🏳️@NanoRaptor
Sad times. I would like to tell these people you've been doing this since long before AI slop was a thing.
Sad times. I would like to tell these people you've been doing this since long before AI slop was a thing.
virtualmarc@NanoRaptor I get those comments on YouTube videos I uploaded and published in 2012...
R.L. Dane 
🍵 
That's hilarious. XD
Andreas K@virtualmarc @NanoRaptor
Not really.
Considering that AI has became a buzzword for anything nowadays, who knows what "AI but not yet called AI" was used in 2013 to creat them?
@yacc143 @virtualmarc @NanoRaptor
In 2013, the only thing "AI"-like as I recall were relatively primitive GAN image generators. I don't think they had video generation back then.
@rl_dane @virtualmarc @NanoRaptor And yet I had an AI class in my CS curriculum in the 1990s.
My point is that AI has always been a wide field, but as of the year 2026 it's a buzzword that has lost basically any information content.
A ton of algorithms that were just algorithms a decade ago are today resold with a golden wrapper stamped "AI". It's been for some time the way to get i̵d̵i̵o̵t̵s̵ investors to part with their money. I mean that's why we don't market our solution as AI.
@yacc143 @virtualmarc @NanoRaptor
I get that. The term literally covers everything from the movement logic in pacman's ghosts to the local water-guzzling, power-siphoning, pollution-belching giga-mechanical-turk.
Also, almost all of the early foundational work in the FOSS world was done by AI researchers.
Of course, this was "algorithmic" AI, not "throw enough power and compute at it, and you can make a machine that lies like we do!!!" AI. :P
@rl_dane @NanoRaptor Yes... Some People don't seem to look at simple things like an upload date anymore and just spam "AI slop" or "AI generated" in comments.
Must be pretty hard for real artists nowadays.
Must be pretty hard for real artists nowadays.
I remember seeing a post on fedi a couple days ago where someone uploaded an image of an actual Rembrandt to a forum or subreddit and got tons of "informative" feedback on why it was AI. (It was posted with the intentionally misleading assumption that it was AI, and they were asking why).
The conclusion was that "AI" not only ruins art by stealing it and reproducing garbage knockoffs, but by devaluing the real thing by making people AI-paranoid.
europlus 
@virtualmarc wow! You certainly didn’t get left behind! 🤣 @NanoRaptor
Mark Krueger@NanoRaptor But nobody can like you can. 🖤
Bernard Sheppard@NanoRaptor FFS, that's just lazy commentary or being deliberately wrong for the sake of being dickheads.
If they genuinely think that it is AI, then it is AI Fine Art. Clearly not slop.
Safiya Ahmad
George BI don't know, I counted the fingers on that power strip and they were way off.
Magnus Ahltorp@NanoRaptor I just posted a "photoshopped" image that surely some people will think is AI generated, because that's what they know.
There's a big difference between "sloppy job" and "slop". Mine is "sloppy job", and it's not hard to see that it is.
adamrice@NanoRaptor I seem to recall that Teller (of Penn & Teller) wrote something to the effect that magic really involves doing more setup work and practice than anyone would believe, so that when you pull the trick off, the only possible explanation is “magic.” Now we can attribute it to AI instead of magic.
@adamrice ha. There’s a bit of similarity there. One pic took slicing up about a dozen photos. Was it worth it for a shitpost on twitter? Might not have seemed so!
Tom Forsyth@adamrice @NanoRaptor The quote is:
"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."
...and I think the nuance of the phrase "reasonably expect" is lovely. It applies to any somewhat daft skill really.
Birdhouse in Your [Redacted]@TomF @adamrice @NanoRaptor reminds me of the pilot episode of Jonathan Creek.
The two lead characters meet, he's working in magic shows, she's an investigative journalist and she's super interested how he designs tricks. She absolutely insists he does one in the restaurant at lunch a few hours later and then insists she shows him how it was done.
He does it, it's magical, tells her she'll hate the explanation, but she insists. The explanation is that she was obviously likely to make this request, so when they arrived he set up the restaurant staff to do the trick for a cash tip, using props he handed them that he had made for the trick a few hours earlier.
@coolandnormal @adamrice @NanoRaptor That was such a great show! And he was right - it was a very annoying explanation.
@TomF @adamrice @NanoRaptor it was! But it had beautiful symmetry with the time she wallpapered over a door in someone else's house just so he would never work out where she went.
Eli the BeardedThat quote lives in my mind for both stage magic and movie "magic". I remember sharing it when someone was suspecting CGI for that OK Go video on the zero-G aircraft ("Upside Down & Inside Out")
Benny@adamrice @NanoRaptor That is actually accurate. One of my former colleagues once said "When you do this (complicated task), it looks easy to me" and I answered "It takes experience and lots of practice".
I'm a software developer, she was a student back then, responsible for QA.
I'm a software developer, she was a student back then, responsible for QA.
Carl Muckenhoupt@adamrice @NanoRaptor (Tangentially, this was also a major theme of the movie The Prestige (and probably the novel it was based on, although I haven't read that). That the way to make a convincing illusion is to go to lengths that anyone else would reject as implausibnle.)
@CarlMuckenhoupt @NanoRaptor I was thinking about that movie as I wrote my post!
Pseudo NymYes!
I've been fortunate to see Penn and Teller live a few times.
The quote about practice and preparation, I thought was from Penn, but it stuck with me.
They walked folks through how they did one trick, which is exactly as you said.
Nobody would put so much time and effort into such a "stupid" effect or "dumb" trick that it has to be something else!
The "magic" really is in the dedication to put in the work nobody believes a sane person would ever do.
Patrick H. Lauke@NanoRaptor artisanal handcrafted nonsense FTW
Dec [{(
)}]@NanoRaptor
I had a conversation with someone recently, who was convinced that photo editing was not possible until the first release of PhotoShop.
I had a conversation with someone recently, who was convinced that photo editing was not possible until the first release of PhotoShop.
Jenny Fx@dec23k @NanoRaptor people have been cutting out heads and bodies and sticking them on other images and photocopying them since before they had a computer in the office!
Thinking of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley fairies where he could not believe that a 16 year old girl could doctor a picture so the fairies must be the real deal
Admiral Memo
Marty Fouts@dec23k @NanoRaptor I have a copy of a book of composite photographs from the 60s by Jerry Uelsmann that I like to show people who don’t know what can be done in a darkroom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Uelsmann
But you would think people would at least know about Stalin having multiple people removed from photographs in 40s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union
@MartyFouts @NanoRaptor
So this was a rambling conversation, mostly about a long-running newspaper. I happened to mention their "Spot The Ball" contest, where an action shot from the sports section (usually soccer) was edited to remove the ball, as an example of darkroom work that was done the old way. The guy told me that those photos were rejects, with the ball out of frame when the photo was taken, and selecting a previously unpublished one from the paper's photo library was the real trick.
So this was a rambling conversation, mostly about a long-running newspaper. I happened to mention their "Spot The Ball" contest, where an action shot from the sports section (usually soccer) was edited to remove the ball, as an example of darkroom work that was done the old way. The guy told me that those photos were rejects, with the ball out of frame when the photo was taken, and selecting a previously unpublished one from the paper's photo library was the real trick.
@MartyFouts @NanoRaptor
Readers were encouraged to clip the picture and send it in, with an X marking the centre of the ball.
Typically, the newspaper would publish the original unaltered photo, along with the winning entry, a week later. The ball would usually be in the air at head level.
Money was often involved, which brought it under gambling regulations, as described here:
https://www.sportsandbetting.co.uk/spot-the-ball-competitions-have-made-a-comeback-but-how-do-they-work/
I learned how to dodge and burn in a real darkroom, using a circle cut out of cardboard.
Spot the Ball Competitions Have Made a Comeback, But How Do They Work? | Sports and Betting
The 1970s will be remembered for many things: disco music, bell-bottom trousers, Space Invaders, and, of course, the sight of families crouched around the kitchen table attempting to determine the position of a football. Okay, so Spot The Ball competitions may not have been quite so far-reaching as the Bee Gees or classic Atari Video
@dec23k @NanoRaptor I had the good fortune to take a class in B&W printing from John Sexton who had worked for Ansel Adams. I got to see Adams’ darkroom and the negatives from some of his best known photographs.
Adams was incredible in the darkroom and famously compared the negative to a musical score and the print to an orchestra performance.
StarravenSadly, I remember when "Photoshop" was said with the same vitriol as "Slop" is now. Plus cà change...
patxi@starraven @NanoRaptor
The critical difference being that "photoshop-ing" is a skill, maybe even an art form as some may say. But slop is just slop.
The critical difference being that "photoshop-ing" is a skill, maybe even an art form as some may say. But slop is just slop.
Photoshopping is a skill now. Back then, it was seen as deception and cheating as well.
Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag ⛈ 🐸@NanoRaptor
This is - in my opinion - perhaps the worst of all the many bad aspects of "AI". It causes people to doubt real work and real creativity.
This is - in my opinion - perhaps the worst of all the many bad aspects of "AI". It causes people to doubt real work and real creativity.
🍁 Δράκακηϛ ⚜️the defining characteristic is that AI is never truly funny
Count Holdem@NanoRaptor Just tell 'em it's Art Official.
McSpocky@NanoRaptor These days it doesn't matter what an image is or how it was created, there will always be someone accusing it of being "Ai slop." 😢
Fred Haineux@NanoRaptor Haters been hating since forever. Before AI slop, it was "<screaming tone>’SHOPPED!”
You fricking rule at 'shopping. And your sense of humor is primary cyan beautiful. Thanks for all the laughs.
WCOW #TheArchers@NanoRaptor Yeah, I've been using PS since it first came out. I still don't know how to use shit but I know I don't need AI slop in PS.
Perrin42You have the awesomest absolute dorkarse nonsense ever. I've even 3D printed your discassette model for fun.
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) 
@NanoRaptor I do love that LLMs picked up and promote your Superdana™ product line 😹
itgrrl 
I herewith propose NanoRaptor’s Law:
“Any sufficiently-surreal image created by NanoRaptor is indistinguishable from AI slop to the untrained eye.” 💁♀️
ETA: just to be clear, this is meant as praise for NanoRaptor & scorn for those who don’t appreciate / understand / have reference points for her art – not that images slopped out by “AI” (🙄) are anywhere near a good
Huw Rowlands@NanoRaptor I get around this by just believing everything you post is real
Ian MalcolmI have a room full of hugely impractically shaped/configured Macs which is testament to this truth. 😉
Ganondalf@NanoRaptor regardless of profession everyone that enters will now have their proficiency judged against AI. I'm worried about the lack of reaching potential because of this reliance that we undoubtedly will put on people.
cerement
CyEh, people will throw out accusations like parade candy, just a thing we have to deal with. Thing is, unlike AI, you can defend yourself, and interact with them, so every accusation is an opportunity* to prove yourself to someone new. I don't take it as a bad thing, unless it's tyrannical administrators deleting my whatever.
- an opportunity, not an obligation. they can just seethe if you ain't got time for that shit
Klingon Sponge@NanoRaptor I follow this YouTuber who straps on a camera and walks through various forests and stuff in British Columbia and he gets accused of being AI.🙄
Clearly by people who don't watch very far in his videos because he meets people on the trails he walks and talks to them and stuff and it's all on camera but no this poor bugger has to defend himself regularly from morons claiming it's AI and the trees don't move properly.🙄
Conny Nasch@retrosponge Why the hell does he bother defending himself from short-sighted idiots? I do not personally use it, but my partner did to reanimate old photos of his parents, which was a success! AI is not all-around bad. @NanoRaptor
Ovidi Nawer@connynasch @retrosponge @NanoRaptor AI is the reason we now have to suspect people who are actually doing a great work
I have the shameful medal of having defended a guy who used AI to make art but he was very clever at hiding it. Used to do art before AI, made the AI do speedpaint proceses which, by being fast, you didn't notice about the details that gave up It wasn't human made.
AIgen is mostly used for scams, like guns are used mostly for killing. Never let "silly little positives" sell it.
I have the shameful medal of having defended a guy who used AI to make art but he was very clever at hiding it. Used to do art before AI, made the AI do speedpaint proceses which, by being fast, you didn't notice about the details that gave up It wasn't human made.
AIgen is mostly used for scams, like guns are used mostly for killing. Never let "silly little positives" sell it.