John Oliver finds a creative way to get revenge on AI spam

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the past couple of years, you’ll probably have stumbled across some “AI slop” — the name for mass-produced, AI-generated content that’s now all over social media.

In the Last Week Tonight clip above, John Oliver unpacks the issues with this new type of spam, from fake images dominating Pinterest to AI disinformation about war and natural disasters causing a problem for first responders.

“AI slop can be somewhat lucrative for its creators, massively lucrative for the platforms that use it to drive engagement, and worryingly corrosive to the general concept of objective reality,” says Oliver. “And look, I’m not saying some of this stuff isn’t fun to watch — what I’m saying is some of it’s potentially very dangerous, and even when it isn’t the technology that makes it possible only works because it trains on the work of actual artists. 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’s response? “Create real art by ripping off AI slop.” In this case, that means hiring chainsaw sculptor Michael Jones, whose real work has been used to generate viral AI imagery, and pay him to create a wood sculptor based on what Oliver considers “the finest and most inexplicable piece of slop produced to date.”

The end result is truly a masterpiece.