I first want you to think about how AI creations can't be copyrighted. Nobody is actually making it, the AI is, and AI is not a person, it's not conscious, It forms its content through mindless combinations of what is most popular in our culture. Nobody owns AI creations, but in a way, we all do. Every time I draw a crude picture of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, I am an owner of him. It's not like fan art, because Tung wasn't art in the first place, but he became art when I drew him.

Now let's think about fairy tales of old. They were formed through oral storytelling, with people changing things about the story each time. The most popular variants became the widely told versions. Nobody can claim ownership of Hansel and Gretel, but each time someone tells the story, or draws art of it, they become an author of the story. They just introduced it to people who had never heard the story, or at least changed the way the know the story. You can't copyright Hansel and Gretel, but if you make illustrations of it, you can copyright those illustrations, just not the story itself.

A key difference is that fairy tales are art, whereas AI slop is and never will be art.

Next, think about the content of the slop. Lots have fruit people, which is a combination of fruit (very common in our lives) and people (also very common). Fairy tail creatures like dragons are formed from imaginary combinations of real creatures like snakes, horses, lizards, bats and birds. Or like how Baba Yaga features a house with chicken legs, and Tralalero Tralala is a shark with sneakers. Tung Tung Tung sahur is an anthropomorphized Kentongan, an Indonesian drum.

Lastly, the AI slop often has the characters conducting schemes to get money and/or power, often involving betraying and/or murder others. Old fairy tales would have this too, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, etc. Characters eating certain foods that give the powers or heal them, sacrificing ones self for their loved ones, evil parents that seek to exploit their children, siblings growing up differently, characters becoming more conventionally attractive,--- these are all nothing new.

The one newer element is the characters always being super conventionally attractive, as well as cheating on each other, raping each other, etc. To me this feel more like a product of more modern media, after all, the first fruit AI slop was a parody of Love Island.

To conclude however, I don't believe AI slop is at all on par with fairy tales in terms of quality or qualification of being art. Examples of modern folklore would be slenderman, the backrooms, etc. However, I think it makes perfect sense generative AI would copy a pattern as old as our species.

Source: https://youtube.com/shorts/NCN3HlFDl_M?is=ivr3_cPSGGUK_scp

Sloptober 27

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