Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and the pattern is impossible to miss: animated storytimes featuring melodramatic kittens, surreal clips of people performing impossible actions, fantastical “which bed will you sleep in the hardest” montages. These strange videos flooding our feeds have one thing in common. They are generated by artificial intelligence.

Often called “AI slop,” this artificially-generated, low-quality content has surged across social media with the release of generative tools like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo, which allow users to create videos from simple text prompts.

“The type of content that AI creates usually tries to go toward the extremes of human emotion,” Abby Wang (11) said. “It could be things like rage bait, or those really cute, heartwarming videos or even brain rot type memes. Our brains get a hit out of seeing something that shouldn’t be possible, and these videos receive so much engagement because people are easily entertained by things appealing to their imagination.”

While the bizarre nature of AI slop makes it easily identifiable, other generated content can be much less obvious. Newer models like Sora 2 and Midjourney V7 can produce highly realistic videos and images that can be difficult to distinguish from reality.

For artists who have traditionally used social media to share and discover work, this growing ambiguity has complicated that experience. Artist and Harker Eclectic Literature and Media Editor-in-Chief Carissa Wu (12) often browses art accounts on social media and notes the signs of AI-generated content she sees. 

“Sometimes if the artwork is super shiny, or if the hands or hair are cut off weirdly, I start getting suspicious,” Carissa said. “Before, you probably could tell more easily, but now you have to really study the details. Sometimes I do get tricked because I’m not really paying that much attention.”

Computer science and art student Julie Shi (’24) described the rapid pace at which AI-generated art has evolved. While working at a company that examined the capabilities of generative AI tools for web design, she saw models becoming increasingly adept at mimicking human art styles.

“If you use ChatGPT to generate an image of, for example, a cat eating a pizza, it would look airbrushed and obviously AI,” Shi said. “But if you ask something like Midjourney or Adobe Firefly to do the same thing in a specific style, then it would probably be a lot less noticeable. AI will never be able to create anything truly original, but it will become more and more indistinguishable from human work.” 

The presence of AI is immediately visible on any social media app, but its influence has also extended into nearly every form of media we consume. In movies, TV shows and commercials, AI has been used to generate entire scenes and enhance accents.

“It’s been force-fed to us on every platform in every facet of our lives, so I don’t think there’s ever a world in which AI goes away,” illustrator and screenwriter Nina Gee (‘20) said. “We in creative industries have to adapt around it in some ways. Obviously, it’d be amazing if people saw it for what it was and not as a replacement for creatives, but unfortunately, that is kind of the way it’s been marketed and been pushed onto lots of companies.”

AI-generated media has also become more overt: the rock band The Velvet Sundown gained 1.4 million listeners on Spotify before revealing themselves as entirely AI-generated; Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated actress created by the company Particle 6, raised backlash after reportedly entering discussions to be represented by a major Hollywood agencies. Gee believes that even as audiences currently disapprove of AI as a substitute for human creativity, its increasing prevalence will harm people in the creative industry. 

“What matters is that creativity has fundamentally been monetized in our society, and so because of that, people have decided to make creativity and creative endeavors their livelihood,” Gee said. “The companies who are creating this AI know that AI can never replace human creativity, but they can convince executives in other companies about what AI can do, and convince them to replace their own creatives. That matters because that’s where the money is going.”

Funding for AI will not only affect artist paychecks, but also the texture and quality of stories themselves. As AI becomes more embedded in media production, the creative media that audiences consume may become more uniform. 

“The content we consume is going to have less nuance and subtlety,” Shi said. “The whole point of AI is to streamline processes that occur in the production of a film. Because AI is just generating content based off of past data, movies will become less innovative. It’s a feedback loop because the more AI content that’s generated, the more homogeneous data is being fed in.”

Gee warns that this replacement of human creation with AI-generated content, particularly in artistic works, ultimately hollows out the reason art exists in the first place.

“You find these pieces of art, and you realize that your experience is not singular — you are not alone in this feeling,” Gee said. “To me, the purpose of art is finding connections through shared experience. Computers can’t do that because they fundamentally have not experienced it.”

Social media used to be a platform for everyone to share their daily experiences and catch up on their friends’ lives. Now, as apps like Instagram and TikTok become more about entertainment than connection, many content creators push out videos and images meant to generate sensation, blurring the line between truth and reality.

That online environment has made media platforms especially susceptible to AI-generated art, videos and news. This content flooded platforms, shifting viewers’ attitudes about social media content toward distrust. According to a PEW research study, while 76% of Americans acknowledge that it’s important to recognize AI-generated content, only 53% feel confident at identifying such material. 

Though AI content is most obvious on social media, this skepticism goes beyond those platforms alone. Abby noted that more people distrust AI as it becomes tougher to distinguish from reality.

“I’ve basically just stopped trusting anything I see online, not only these obviously AI videos, but also the news or even what you find on the web,” Abby said. “It seems that everything has been infiltrated by AI — search engines have their own AI assistants now. The prevalence of AI on Instagram has also made me aware of how pervasive these artificial intelligence tools have become.”

Art teacher Joshua Martinez noted that the growing power of generative AI has fueled insecurity and anger among artists who feel that AI has overstepped.

“At the beginning, I felt defensive, because artists spend a lot of time honing their craft and working really carefully to make something,” Martinez said. “As far as art made with generative algorithms, they essentially recombine existing images to make new images. That felt sort of sarcastic and nihilistic, like, ‘why do you have to go after the artist when you could just stay in your lane?’”

As AI-generated images and artwork saturate the content creation world, both viewers and artists have begun to question what should even be considered as art. For instance, the early 2025 Studio Ghibli AI art trend, where social media users used AI tools to immediately transform personal photos and post them online, sparked online debate as artists pushed back against the widespread use of AI to copy art styles.

Beyond impacting how others view art and creation, the prevalence of AI in the media has changed how artists perceive their own creations. Influencers that specialize in digital art or CGI now have to work even harder to “prove” to viewers that their creations are authentic, and differentiate themselves from AI slop. 

“There are thousands of channels out there just pumping out AI slop,” Abby said. “Well-established creators who existed before this whole AI epidemic really have an edge, especially if they can convince their audience that they’re anti-AI and that they will continue to keep that human-made aspect in their content.” 

Despite the widespread disdain for AI creation, AI videos and art continue proliferating in the digital realm, causing a devaluation of human creativity and skill. Especially on social media where short-form videos aim to grab the short attention span of viewers, aesthetics and wow-factor often take precedence over the actual meaning behind art. 

However, consumers are not the only ones to blame. Corporations that employ AI creation over human skill for the sake of efficiency play an arguably larger role in expediting the dominance of AI over human creativity. Disney partnered with OpenAI’s generative model Sora in December 2025 to generate short-form videos of iconic Disney characters to promote them across various platforms.

Gee emphasized that companies need to start taking initiative in protecting human creation. She noted that a key step forward would be resisting the tendency to prioritize time efficiency over authentic skill.

“There is an unspoken pressure on creatives to work as fast as AI, which is not possible,” Gee said. “You can type in a prompt and generate 100 images in the time it takes you to pick up a paintbrush. We have to trust in the higher ups and the people who are paying us for our services, trust in humanity and in human skill, rather than valuing profits over product.” 

Although AI improves its accuracy and realism at a rapid pace, individuals can still take actions to protect artists and creators. Abby stressed the importance of media literacy and fact-checking when viewing online content.

“The most effective way to curb its influence would be to teach our generation not believe everything that we see on our phones and really take a step back,” Abby said. “It’ll be  very important for us, as a younger generation, to be able to distinguish between AI content and the actual truth.”

Individuals who consume media online must draw the line between AI and human creations and understand that art extends beyond just aesthetics. In addition, Gee urges artists to embrace their emotions and personal experiences through artwork and continue creating art of their own style, regardless of what generative AI is capable of.

“Art is a manifestation of the soul and reality, and part of that comes with synthesizing all your influences into something that is wholly you,” Nina said. “There’s gonna be the DNA of things that you’ve enjoyed and things that you’ve consumed within your own work, but ultimately, it’s something that you created that’s you on the paper, that’s your writing, your art, your music. It’s your singular experience. That’s something that AI cannot replicate.”