Last Week Tonight frontman John Oliver put AI slop in the crosshairs in the latest edition of the popular HBO show.
AI slop, for the uninitiated, is all the AI-generated imagery that’s starting to take over your feeds on sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Pinterest. The slop can also be AI-generated videos on YouTube, music on platforms like Spotify, and even e-books, news articles, and games.
As Oliver notes in his monologue, the growth of powerful AI-generation tools over the last couple of years has made it easier than ever to “mass produce and flood social media sites with cheap, professional-looking, often deeply weird content.”
Oliver gave a few examples: “Images of Jesus made out of shrimp … videos like Barron Trump wowing the judges on America’s Got Talent while his dad plays backup piano, a pug raising a baby on a desert island, or Pope Francis taking a selfie with Jesus while flying through heaven.”
The Last Week Tonight host also points to some deeply strange though highly creative videos showing people transforming into various fruits and vegetables (6:51), with his favorite one showing a man changing into a red cabbage (yes, it’s as wacky as it sounds).
But the show takes a more troubling turn when Oliver highlights a photo of a man beside a wood carving of a dog (14:49). The photo, which has more than a million likes, is AI-generated, and is very close to another (real) image of a wood sculptor next to a wood carving of a dog. The issue is that generative-AI models are trained on content — including real artworks, books, music, and so on — scraped from the internet, and the artists whose work has been scraped, like this wood sculptor’s efforts, are not being compensated. And worse still, the platforms hosting the slop are raking in revenue, as are some of the folks posting AI slop.
“So any enjoyment you may get from weird, funny AI slop tends to be undercut when you know that someone’s hard work was stolen in order to create it,” Oliver said.
In a neat move at the end of the show (27:02), Oliver brings in the wood carver, Michael Jones, to show off a piece of his own work based on the previously mentioned red cabbage man, neatly turning the tables on AI slop.
“I don’t have a big fix for all of this, or indeed, any of it,” Oliver said. “What I do have, though, is a petty way to respond. Because perhaps one small way to get back at all the AI slop ripping off artists would be to create real art by ripping off AI slop.”
