Authenticity in the Age of Slop

While laid up with bronchitis and considerable brain fog, I somehow got El DeBarge’s 1986 hit “Who’s Johnny” stuck in my head. This naturally led to an investigation into how such an astonishing object came into existence.

The song is almost comically concentrated mid-1980s pop: aggressively glossy, synthetic, and over-engineered, with every available production trick thrown into the mix. ABC’s “The Look of Love” might be the only track that rivals it for the sheer density of ’80s tropes.

So I went looking for the person(s) responsible and discovered someone whose fingerprints are all over this and other monuments of cheese. “Who’s Johnny” was written, produced and arranged by Peter Wolf—not Peter Wolf from the J. Geils Band, as my bronchitis-addled brain initially assumed, but the Austrian-born producer who also unleashed Starship’s “We Built This City” and Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” on the world.

On paper, “Who’s Johnny” seems like a perfect example of pre-AI slop: plastic, disposable, calculated commercial product, assembled for the movie Short Circuit and produced within an inch of its life. But listen closely, and there’s a lot of humanity in there.

However much you dislike the production, El DeBarge is singing the absolute shit out of that song. There is exuberance in the performance. Personality. Gusto.

And consider what it took to make the thing. Peter Wolf arranging and playing multiple instruments. Siedah Garrett, Michael McDonald and others singing backing vocals. Engineers. Assistants. Studios. Catering. People had to decide what ridiculous synthesizer sound belonged where. Somebody had to play the guitar part. Engineers had to stack those backing vocals. The producer had to decide when the mix was finished.

Back then, even disposable culture required an enormous expenditure of human attention. None of this means it was good. It means it was painstakingly, perhaps even lovingly, fashioned.

Human beings have always made crap: popular crap, cynical crap, formulaic crap and stuff designed primarily to make money. AI didn’t invent any of those things. So “slop” can’t simply mean bad media or assembly oriented productions. Motown had formulas. Hollywood has spent a century running tropes into the ground. Plenty of lasting culture was produced because somebody desperately needed a hit.

The difference is that “Who’s Johnny,” however calculated, required human attention. Time, money, musicianship, collaboration, judgment and effort stood between conception and artifact.

Generative AI nukes all of that. You can now produce the functional equivalent of a disposable cultural object without anything resembling the human care that disposable culture once required. AI didn’t invent slop. It industrialized it while removing much of what makes us marvel at why something so ridiculous even exists.

I was thinking of this when I encountered a news item about Roku launching a 24/7 channel devoted to AI-generated programming. The significance isn’t merely that the programming is expectedly shitty. There is already an internet full of shitty AI video. It’s that they constructed a television channel for it.

It’s easy to see why. Conventional programming costs money. Even lousy syndicated television cost money. You need writers, performers, sets, cameras, editors and technicians. Now the programming can be infinite, and allegedly low-cost, though I’m skeptical of the latter.

I should note that we got rid of our Roku TV when I learned that Fox is purchasing the company. Beyond creepy surveillance, I had a feeling this was the next step. I also intuit an emerging divide between intentional and non-intentional consumption. Do I seek something out because I want that thing? Or mere audiovisual stimulation while eating dinner, folding laundry or scrolling?

Generative AI didn’t invent passive consumption. Television has been functioning as electric wallpaper forever. Ditto radio. But it may be the perfect production technology for lean-back media. There doesn’t need to be a compelling reason for any of this crap to exist beyond passive attention harvesting.

Of course, a person can use AI tools while exercising tremendous intentionality. Conversely, a corporation can employ hundreds of humans to manufacture something so thoroughly dictated by metrics and market research that every interesting human impulse has been shaved away.

Here’s the key difference: AI slop is unlikely to shape culture or even get stuck in your head. “Who’s Johnny,” meanwhile, was supposed to be disposable pop. Yet here it is, forty years later, occupying my weary mind. It possesses something much contemporary slop doesn’t: provenance, personality and accumulated human decisions, however questionable.

It may be plastic. But plastic and disposable aren’t the same thing. Perhaps authenticity is when someone actually gives a shit on either end of the pipe.