Join us for a lecture followed by a dinner discussion.

From movie scripts to memes, almost no type of cultural expression now feels safe from AI generation. But what will a culture saturated by AI "slop" look like? What aesthetics will it favor—and how should we critically assess them?

This talk begins to address those questions by examining the close relationship between AI slop and one of its key precursors: the viral content that has saturated its training data. Through the primary example of what it calls the “hypnotic process”—a major viral genre that now infiltrates video slop—the presentation will consider how core aesthetics of virality have begun to color AI-generated culture, and with what implications. 

This event is part of the Data, AI, and Computing Initiative Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Sustaining Next-Generation Digital Projects in the Humanities Working Group.

Presenter

Tess McNulty is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the English Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on a book about major genres of viral content, each of which has been particularly pervasive, not only across platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok), but also throughout the full, fully corporatized social networking era (c. post-2010). She is also now working on political aesthetics, popular TV, and AI-slop. Her academic writing has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Cultural Analytics, and Post45.