Beyond Slop

Why can you feel an artist's voice in an oil painting but not a prompt? Every AI tool asks you to type what you want and hands it back. But meaningful creative work doesn't happen that way. It emerges through process: iteration, accident, surprise. We've been building molds with dials when we should be making clay. In a world of slop we've forgotten to dream bigger, to remember that new technologies should enable new mediums capable of genuinely novel expression. Something has gone wrong, and it's rooted in the ideas behind the technology. Drawing on seven years of building creative AI tools, I'll trace where the dominant paradigm went astray and sketch what humane, process-based alternatives could look like. Then I'll sit down with a leading artist working with AI, Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick, to dig into how he forges a distinct medium and voice while working with these technologies. ------- Joel Simon is an artist, toolmaker and researcher exploring creative AI as a medium. He created Artbreeder, one of the first massively collaborative AI art platforms, and runs Morphogen, a studio designing expressive, process-based creative tools. His work explores biology and emergence as interfaces for creativity. Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick is an artist whose practice focuses on information (not only as data, but as computation, language, and systemic/memetic structures) and complex systems. As one half of the artistic duo Entangled Others, a practice that is a shared collaboration with the artist Sofia Crespo, his focus continues particular threads of artistic research and creation encountered in their duo practice, but extends notions of complex systems into the realm of emergent phenomena.