In other words, AI partially solves the technique problem, but not the taste problem.

In the arts the differentiators have always been technical skill, technical inventiveness, original imagination, and taste - the indefinable factor that makes one creative work more resonant than another.

AI automates some of those, often to a better-than-median extent. But so far taste remains elusive. It's the opposite of the "Throw everything in a bucket and fish out some interesting interpolation of it by poking around with some approximate sense of direction until you find something you like" that defines how LLMs work.

The definition of slop is poor taste. By that definition a lot of human work is also slop.

But that also means that in spite of the technical crudity, it's possible to produce interesting AI work if you have taste and a cultivated aesthetic, and aren't just telling the machine "make me something interesting based on this description."