by Narain Jashanmal on October 3rd 2025
The world is bracing for a flood.
This week’s launches of OpenAI’s Sora app and Meta’s Vibes, apps designed for the instant creation and remixing of AI video, signal that the "ChatGPT for creativity" moment has arrived. They promise a “Cambrian explosion” of new art forms, yet they simultaneously intensify a profound cultural anxiety.
That anxiety has a name: AI slop.
It’s a lazy but sticky term for a very real fear: a future where human creativity is drowned by infinite, algorithmically generated mediocrity. Even Sam Altman acknowledged the risk, warning against the "degenerate case" of an "RL-optimized slop feed." But this panic, this vision of art without a soul, is not new. It is the echo of a technological anxiety that began not in a server farm, but in a 1950s German radio studio, with a complaint about "barking hellhounds."
That complaint came from critics horrified by the alien sounds of early electronic music. In this first wave of panic, the fear was not of infinite content, but of inhuman emptiness. The tools were massive, expensive, and esoteric. The composer was becoming a technician; the performer a mere "button-pusher." Critics argued the sounds came "from a world in which there are no humans." The threat wasn't a flood of mediocrity; it was the replacement of human artistry with cold, mechanical abstraction.
But the technology didn't stay locked in the university. It got cheap. The democratization of tools - from MIDI protocols and affordable synthesizers in the 1980s to Digital Audio Workstations in the 1990s - collapsed the studio onto a laptop. The barrier to entry plummeted, and the anxiety transformed. The fear shifted from the cold abstraction of the machine to the chaotic noise of the masses: a deafening roar from a million new "bedroom producers."
The apex of this era, and the blueprint for our current predicament, was Moby's 1999 album Play.
Crafted by a supposed has-been on cheap equipment in his bedroom, Play was initially a commercial failure. The traditional gatekeepers - radio, MTV, the press - ignored it. Faced with disaster, Moby's team devised a radical strategy born of desperation: they licensed every single track for use in films, commercials, and TV shows.
The strategy worked. The music became ubiquitous, a kind of high-quality, atmospheric soundtrack to daily life. Eleven months after its debut, Play was selling 150,000 copies a week.
The legacy of Play is profoundly dualistic. It was the ultimate artistic validation of the bedroom producer. Yet, its success model inadvertently pioneered the aesthetic and economic logic of "slop." The album’s triumph was predicated on its utility: music designed to be heard, but not necessarily listened to. In proving that massive success could be found in functional, atmospheric background music, Play became the patient zero of the slop economy.
This victory revealed a harsher economic reality. The “deafening roar” became a digital tsunami. Today, 120,000 new tracks are uploaded to streaming services daily. The result of this content oversupply was not the thriving creative middle class predicted in The Long Tail. Instead, it reinforced the Superstar Effect, a brutal power-law distribution where a tiny fraction of artists captures the vast majority of rewards.
The data is stark: 87% of the 200 million tracks on streaming services fail to reach 1,000 streams, the eligibility threshold set by Spotify for payouts. The utopian promise of democratization crashed into the physical limit of human attention.
Coming back to Sora and Vibes. GenAI is the logical culmination of these trends. It is the ultimate democratization of the creative act, and it will accelerate the content oversupply exponentially.
The arc of electronic music proves that democratization does not flatten hierarchies; it steepens them. GenAI is the logical extreme: the act of creation is trivialized, and the art of selection becomes paramount. We are entering an age where the struggle for finite attention is absolute, and "slop" is the background noise of that struggle: content optimized for utility, not engagement.
The critical task, therefore, is not generating more (that’s going to keep happening), but designing the systems - the new algorithmic gatekeepers - that can rescue the meaningful from the deluge. The future of culture will be shaped not by the sophistication of our generators, but by the values embedded in our filters.
The strategic question is not what can we create, but how will we choose what matters; and who, or what, will do the choosing?