"Slob" / "slop" is thrown around so much I don't take anyone seriously who drops that word unless the output matches the commentary. There's definitely a lot of trash AI stuff out there don't get me wrong, but there's also insanely high quality AI generated things out there. Hell, I've sent people songs made in Suno, and they were surprised to learn that those were AI generated. If you open suno and type in "90s jazz song" then yeah, you're likely going to get a bit of generic AI slop. If you get into specifics, voice style, instrument types, how they're played, which chords, etc. You can get some insanely high quality music. Not only that but Suno has a whole DAW style extension to it they call Suno Studio which is very powerful, you can get AI stems, you can add your own voice.

Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).

I've also seen people using the term "slop" for low quality human-generated content (lowbrow movies etc)

I’ve been thinking the same thing about AI artwork (as opposed to “chat pls make me a funny picture” and seeing what comes out, although there’s some increasingly interesting things coming out of that approach). There’s often an insane amount of work going into the guts of the image generation pipeline. Sure, it’s not pencil-on-paper drawing things but to me, art is about creating and exploring. All the same vitriol was directed toward cameras, audio synthesisers, 3D rendering, Photoshop, digital cameras, etc. The hate is not about the technique, it’s about someone else getting the same results “easier” with a different workflow.

I just don't get it. Music isn't just what comes out of the speaker. There are artists, with lives and influences behind the music. There is personal expression in the lyrics. Even when the artist chooses to remain anonymous, or they choose to not have lyrics at all, there is still something personal behind it. A DAW is just a tool, and it's a tool that can be used badly, for example, over produced metal with quantized and sample replaced drums. Sure, AI can be a tool for music production just like a DAW can, but when it crosses the line into, lets call it "vibe-produced" music, it is indeed slop, and deserves to be referred to as such.