On OpenAI’s new social app, Sora 2, a popular video shows a disturbingly lifelike Sam Altman sprinting out of a Target store with stolen computer chips, begging police not to take his “precious technology.” The clip is absurdist, a parody of the company’s own CEO, but it also speaks to a larger conversation playing out in dinner conversations, group chats and public spaces around the country: What, exactly, is this technology for?
From ads scrawled with graffiti to online comment sections filled with mockery, the public’s patience with AI-generated media is starting to wear thin. Whether it's YouTube comments deriding synthetic ad campaigns or scribbled in Sharpie across New York City subway posters for AI startups, the public's discontent with the AI boom is growing louder.
What began in 2022 as broad optimism about the power of generative AI to make peoples' lives easier has instead shifted toward a sense of deep cynicism that the technology being heralded as a game changer is, in fact, only changing the game for the richest technologists in Silicon Valley who are benefiting from what appears to be an almost endless supply of money to build their various AI projects — many of which don't appear to solve any actual problems. Three years ago, as OpenAI's ChatGPT was making its splashy debut, a Pew Research center survey found that nearly one in five Americans saw AI as a benefit rather than a threat. But by 2025, 43 percent of U.S. adults now believe AI is more likely to harm them than help them in the future, according to Pew.
Slop as a Service
As AI spreads, public skepticism is turning into into open hostility toward its products and ads. Campaigns made with generative AI are mocked online and vandalized in public. Friend, a startup that spent $1 million on a sprawling campaign in the New York City subway with more than 11,000 advertisements on subway cars, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels, has been hit especially hard. Most of its ads were defaced with graffiti calling the product “surveillance capitalism” and urging people to “get real friends.”
"AI doesn't care if you live or die," reads one tag on a Friend ad in Brooklyn.
Other brands like Skechers are seeing similar backlash for an AI-generated campaign showing a distorted woman in sneakers, dismissed as lazy and unprofessional. Many of the Skechers subway posters were quickly defaced — some tagged with “slop,” the memeified shorthand for AI’s cheap, joyless flood of content, now embodied by the Altman deepfakes flooding Sora.
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