Google's AI-Generated Content Looks a Lot Like Slop to Me

"What in the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was that?" I muttered under my breath. 

Google had just shown a demo of a film it had made using its own AI video generation software Flow, in which a grandfather was trying to invent a flying car with the help of a giant chicken. It was, as told by the presenter of the I/O keynote, "pretty awesome." It's not the word I would have chosen.

This was a familiar pattern I noticed throughout Tuesday's event. Google would show us an example of its content generation tools in action and then tell us how amazing and magical the results were. But what I was seeing with my own eyes was neither amazing nor magical. It looked to me a lot like AI slop.

Its artistic merit cannot go unchallenged.

James Martin/CNET

AI slop, for those unfamiliar with the term, is low-quality, aesthetically unappealing content that has been generated by AI. Once you become familiar with the tells of the majority of AI-generated visual media, you can't unsee them. There's something eerie and soulless to this style of content, which is at once both hyper-realistic and obviously phony. And unfortunately for Google, even its latest AI tools can't seem to generate media that doesn't have this undesirable veneer to it based on the examples the company showed us during I/O.

Google spent a significant portion of its keynote running through updates to these content generation tools, which is curious given content generation is not without its controversial aspects. For starters, there's the environmental tradeoff of using AI at all. Then there's the contentious issue of what media these media-generating models might have been trained on. Not forgetting the ongoing debate over the true artistic merit of this content, and the fate of the real creatives some of them have been designed to replace.

From the moment the event opened with a gimmicky video generated entirely by Google's Veo tool, I had my concerns about what the company would try to sell us as examples of good AI art during the keynote. Having watched the whole thing, I've come away unimpressed. 

I know there may be those who vehemently disagree me about the quality of Google's AI-generated content. But as with any art that goes out into the world, there is bound to be a diversity of opinion about its value. It's a criticism Google must contend with if its intention in the long term is to provide the world with AI tools that are net-win for the creative and artistic industries.