Why "AI Slop" Might Be the Best Thing to Happen to Visual Storytelling (ispo.ai)

When Sora 2 and Meta's Vibes hit the market they unleashed a wave of striking but narratively thin clips—what critics call "AI slop": hyperreal, uncanny visuals that look impressive but lack coherent storytelling. That surge isn’t a failure of models so much as the familiar pattern when powerful creative tools become broadly available before people learn to use them well. The piece puts this moment in historical context (early photography, desktop publishing, the synth, early YouTube), arguing that messy mass experimentation is the apprenticeship through which a new visual grammar emerges. The real technical and cultural shift isn’t single‑prompt image generation, it’s iteration at scale: models let creators test dozens of approaches to a sequence in the time it once took to craft one, compressing feedback loops and shifting value from execution to taste and judgment. That creates distinct tooling needs—workflows that prioritize iterative loops, marketplaces for custom styles and model fine‑tunes, and training/reskilling infrastructure—as well as economic implications (displacement of some roles, emergence of new creator economies). Bottom line: polish becomes commoditized, judgment and curation become scarce skills, and success will hinge on building ecosystems that return value to creators. (Note: ISPO says it’s rethinking AI video creation and launching a public beta.)