The Distillery

Optional AI, Mandatory Tumblr

Here’s the core vibe:

“WE ARE IN A GLOBAL WATER CRISIS. THIS WILL AFFECT YOU TOO. YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO SPEEDING UP YOUR OWN DEMISE.”

And my personal favorite:

“And don’t say any of that ‘but your phone and social media uses water!!’ Yes I know bitch, and the whole point is to limit how much of that you contribute to. I’m hardly on social media at all these days aside from here, and have cut back my phone usage heavily. Ai however, COMPLETELY OPTIONAL.”

So we’ve arrived at a new hierarchy of Needs:

AI – decadent sin.

Posting on Tumblr – apparently a basic survival function.

Notice the move: they fully acknowledge that phones and social media also burn resources… and then proceed to spend those same resources on a multi‑paragraph rant about how you are killing the planet by using AI. The self‑usage is “limited” and therefore morally pure. Your usage, if it includes AI, is corruption.

What’s “optional” here, exactly?

Running a model to help you think, write, or experiment – optional and unethical.

Hammering out performative manifestos on Tumblr or ex‑Twitter every thirty minutes – that, apparently, is so essential Maslow just forgot to add “shitposting about AI” as the sixth level of the pyramid.

If you genuinely believe data centers are an apocalyptic issue, the first thing you’d classify as optional is not “AI in creative spaces”. It’s the endless stream of reactive posts, discourse cycles, and moral grandstanding that could vanish tomorrow and change absolutely nothing in anyone’s material life.

Calling AI “COMPLETELY OPTIONAL” while treating your own permanent presence in social feeds as non-negotiable is selective asceticism: other people’s tools count as excess; your own habits receive the far more flattering label of necessity.

I wouldn’t have started thinking about “slop” at all if people hadn’t started screaming about AI.

Before “AI art” became a panic keyword, I didn’t systematically scan my feed going: Is this actually interesting, or is it just warm recycled content? I’d scroll, shrug, move on. Lazy fanart, lazy horny memes, lazy fanfic — they were just background noise.

Then the anti‑AI crusaders showed up. Suddenly every second post was a sermon: AI is slop. AI is lazy. AI is content, not art.

And a funny thing happened: once you say “AI slop” out loud, your brain quietly adds:

pencil slop

ink slop

brush slop

Photoshop slop

fandom slop

Hogwarts slop

horny meme slop

Because once the word exists, you can’t pretend it applies only to one technology. Slop is not a file format. Slop is what happens when the inside of your head runs on autopilot and you keep feeding everyone the same safe tropes, the same faces, the same recycled fantasies.

It’s hilarious and a bit tragic: the very people who went on crusade against “AI slop” accidentally invented a lens that makes their own work look painfully cheap. Now they have to live in a world where other people look at their pencil sketches, their fanfic, their “traditional art” and say, very calmly:

Yeah, that’s slop too.

They wanted “AI” to be the villain. What they actually summoned was a word for content that wastes everyone’s time, regardless of whether it was born from a neural network or a 2B pencil.

If you were really just here “for fun,” you wouldn’t care what anyone uses to write.

You’d be busy having fun.

The only reason someone writes a whole manifesto about how AI‑users have a “fucked up relationship with validation” is because their own validation is hanging by a thread.

If your sense of being a creator was stable, you wouldn’t need the fandom to reassure you that your way of making words is the pure, morally correct one.

A creator who’s actually creating lives very differently:

they make their thing, they follow their curiosity, they get lost in the work.

If they see something they love, they notice it, maybe shout about it.

If they see something they don’t like, they scroll past without tantrums or sermons.

Because making things is simply more interesting than policing how other people make theirs.

So when someone starts drawing hard moral borders — “you have no place here,” “plagiarism machine,” “soulless garbage” — what they’re really defending is not art, not community, but their own fragile self‑image as The Real Author.

They need AI user to be evil, fake, lesser, so that their status can stay safely above someone else’s.

If you actually know you’re a creator, tools are just tools.

Pen, keyboard, language model — none of that threatens you, because none of that is the source of your value.

The source is the fact that you’re making something, instead of standing in the doorway yelling at others about how they’re doing it “wrong.”

That’s why it’s hard to believe truly creative people are leading the anti‑AI crusade.

The loudest voices in that crowd don’t sound like they’re in love with making things.

A very advanced concealment strategy. 🙄🍿

A small note for anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation: if someone makes a public post about you, names your account, uses your content, sends an audience in your direction, and adds personal abuse or invented details about your life, you are allowed to report it.

Then, in 2024, they built a data center. A terrifying AI moved in.

And that was it. Canada caught fire.

P.S. Having lived through wildfires where I live, I have nothing but sympathy for everyone suffering through them.

Everyone suddenly becomes a moral economist the moment AI shows up.

“AI art steals jobs from artists.” Interesting. Then let’s run that logic somewhere people actually have skin in the game.

Casual sex, dating apps, sex work — all of it massively increases access to intimacy without commitment. By the same reasoning, that ecosystem is “stealing spouses” from the institution of marriage. Every low-friction encounter is, theoretically, one less person pushed toward long-term commitment. Right?

So where are the op-eds demanding we restrict access to sex in order to protect marriage as a labor market for emotional and reproductive stability?

Where are the think pieces about “unfair competition” from people who don’t require vows, mortgages, or joint tax filings?

Nowhere. Because we intuitively understand something there that we conveniently forget in the AI conversation: abundance doesn’t destroy value — it exposes what the value actually was.

If the only thing holding marriage together were scarcity of alternatives, that’s not a sacred institution. That’s a bottleneck. If the only thing sustaining a career in art is gatekeeping access to production, that’s artificial friction.

You don’t get to celebrate liberation in one domain and call it theft in another just because the second one threatens your status hierarchy.

And the uncomfortable part — the one people keep trying to aestheticize away — is that both cases force the same question:

Was the commitment ever desired, or was it coerced by lack of options?

Because once options explode, people don’t become worse. They become honest.

Introduction: one Emi, many questions

It started, of course, with a comment. Under an AI-generated wave someone confidently announced: this is “not art”. Not because the image changed, not because their feelings changed — but because they suddenly learned which tool was used.

That tiny outrage did something very useful for me: it pushed a very old question back to the surface — who actually counts as an artist? Because if one JPEG can be “art” at first glance and “not art” after reading the bio, maybe the problem is not in the picture at all.

From there, I went backwards. If our contemporary Emis patrol the internet calling themselves “real artists” because they can draw with their hands, what did people historically demand from artists beyond “I can hold a brush”? Spoiler: a lot more than a steady wrist and an expensive set of oils.

Part 1. When the artist stopped being just “the guy with a brush”

For a long time, painters were treated as high-end craftsmen. You paid them like you’d pay a good mason or a goldsmith: for hours, materials, clean execution. Technique was the whole story.

Renaissance theory breaks that. People like Leon Battista Alberti start describing painting as a science and a language, not just a manual craft: the painter should understand geometry, optics, anatomy, proportion, narrative, and human emotion — otherwise the picture may be technically polished and still intellectually empty.

So already in the 15th century, the job description quietly mutates from “someone who applies paint correctly” to “someone who thinks with images”. And that’s the part modern discourse somehow managed to forget.

Part 2. The universal skills that always came with the job

If you strip away specific techniques (oil, red chalk, watercolor, 3D, Midjourney), what did people actually look for when they said “real artist”?

1. The ability to see, not just to make

Artists were always expected to have a trained gaze:

to notice proportions, light, gesture, expressions that a regular viewer simply skims past;

to sense the fine differences in composition: why one scene holds together and another falls apart;

to look at other people’s work not as “like / don’t like”, but as a set of decisions.

Today we call this visual literacy and visual culture. And it is a skill that takes years to build, not a side effect of buying brushes.

2. Building a story, not just a picture

Alberti was already saying that the main thing in painting is istoria — the story it tells. Which means the artist has to be able to:

construct a narrative inside the frame;

place accents so the eye travels along a trajectory instead of bouncing randomly;

choose details that serve the meaning, not just “look pretty”.

Whether you like it or not, someone who builds a series of AI images into a coherent visual narrative is doing the same kind of work fresco painters did, just with different tools.

3. Curation: selection, montage, cutting the trash

No sane artist shows all their sketches and failed canvases. Historically, a brutally important part of the job was:

to throw away 90% of the in‑between junk;

to choose the handful of decisions that actually carry the idea;

and sometimes to assemble found objects, references, quotations into a new statement.

That is curation: selection, montage, composition. In an era where you can generate a thousand images in an evening, this skill becomes the nervous system of creative work.

4. Thinking beyond a single medium

Historically, artists almost never stayed welded to one medium until death. They would:

learn from architects, poets, playwrights;

think in terms of space, body, text, ritual;

transplant techniques from one field to another (composition from theatre, gestures from rhetoric, symbolism from religion).

Today this gets rebranded as “cross‑disciplinary thinking”, “conceptual thinking”, “art direction”. But essentially it’s the same demand: stop being a hand that performs; start being a head that manipulates meaning through whatever tools are available.

5. Social intelligence and reputation

Another entertaining line from old texts: the artist should know how to behave. Not just draw — negotiate, communicate, work with patrons, be a functional human being who doesn’t wreck a commission with their own attitude.

Put bluntly: if you spend your evenings under creative directors’ posts, typing in all caps about how their work is “not real art”, you’re failing a baseline competence that was already considered important five hundred years ago.

Part 3. The modern error: the artist as “hands without a head”

Where did contemporary culture go off the rails? We slid back to the most primitive model: artist = someone who does something with their hands. Mind, taste, visual literacy, curation, narrative, the ability to work with tools — all of this is edited out as “non‑essential”.

That’s exactly where the AI panic comes from:

if your entire concept of an artist is limited to motor skills,

then any tool that shortens the distance between idea and image feels like a personal attack.

People cling to technique as identity: “I am somebody because I can draw like this”. The rest of the profession — seeing, thinking, selecting, connecting, inventing — stays invisible to those who never learned to do it.

And that’s why they can so easily say “not art” about a piece that hit them before they found out which software was in the pipeline. In their worldview, the artist is the hands. Anything that breaks this picture must be kicked out of the category.

Part 4. The artist after AI: back to the original brief

Paradoxically, AI drags us back to an older, more honest version of the artist:

tools become cheap, fast, in some sense interchangeable;

the real battleground shifts to ideas, selection, visual literacy, the ability to carve one clear line out of a million possibilities;

suddenly there is a massive demand for people who can think in terms of art direction, not just “make a pretty line”.

What distinguishes a living artist from endless generations is not that they own a brush, but that they own criteria: why this image exists, what it does to the viewer, where it leads the next one, what it adds to your visual world.

In other words, everything that historically was considered the core of the profession, not a decorative add‑on.

Modern culture has unfortunately raised an army of people who are convinced: “I’m an artist because I can do something with my hands” and have absolutely no idea how absurdly huge a block of work and skills hides behind the word artist.

First they see a wave.

Just a wave — texture, movement, light, that little hit of “oh, damn.” They repost it, call it “real art,” throw hearts around like it’s some considered, eternal verdict.

Then someone scrolls to the bio, sees “AI Explorer” and a Midjourney hashtag.

And suddenly the exact same JPEG stops being art. Not a single pixel changes — the only thing that changes is their willingness to admit their own reaction was real.

This isn’t even a serious question of “what is art?”.

It’s a panicked little rebranding:

“As long as I thought it was oil paint, I was a refined connoisseur.

Now that it’s AI, turns out I just liked a random generator output.”

They literally rewrite their own “wow” after the fact, because it landed on the wrong square of their belief map.

You’re apparently not allowed to enjoy an image if behind it isn’t a properly exhausted human with a brush, but a human+algorithm stack.

Much easier to declare the whole category invalid: not art, and you’re safe again.

My favorite side effect: without that tiny AI trigger, I would’ve completely scrolled past it.

Perfect wave, likes, comments — and I’d have filed it away as yet another pretty picture in the endless feed of pretty pictures.

But the moment someone started shrieking “YOU’RE ART? THIS IS WRONG,” I got interested.

I went to the profile, went through the works, hit follow, because if one frame makes people that unhinged, there’s clearly something worth talking to.

So yes, thank you to everyone typing “not art.”

How many styles can you actually name without googling?

I keep seeing people build their entire “creative identity” on one sentence: I don’t use AI.

Not “I make good work.” Not “I push myself artistically.” Just “I don’t touch the scary machine, therefore I’m clean.”

It’s adorable, in a museum-exhibit way. Like watching someone proudly announce they only use analog film while shooting the same boring picture of a coffee cup for the 500th time.

Let’s talk about slop.

Slop is not AI-specific. Slop is what happens when you take the path of least resistance in your own head and then try to pass it off as “art”.

The 900th copy-pasted horny meme with a different character face slapped on.

The same generic busty blonde in the same three poses, in slightly different “fantasy” outfits.

The fanfic that drops an OC into Hogwarts and then runs them through the exact same three tropes you’ve seen since 2007.

None of that requires a neural network. Most of it is proudly “pencil-only”, “tablet-only”, “traditional”, “pure”.

And you know what? It’s still slop.

If your idea is “Hermione but hot” or “Slytherin OC but even more traumatized” and you just run that through the usual angst/romance pipeline — congratulations. You’ve produced content. You haven’t produced anything culture actually needed.

“Pencilslop” is real. Welcome to the party.

I saw someone meltdown over a Tumblr user who’s pro‑AI and dared to say “pencilslop”. The outrage was almost touching:

“Holy shit I never thought I’d see the day.”

Of course you didn’t. You thought “slop” was reserved for AI prompts and cheap mobile filters. You thought as long as you were grinding away with a pencil, you were automatically absolved of banality.

Newsflash:

You can generate slop with Midjourney.

You can generate slop with Blender.

And you can absolutely generate slop with a pencil.

If you never push your ideas beyond “same hot wizard, different slightly darker trauma”, your medium is irrelevant. The laziness lives in the concept, not in the tool.

“I don’t use AI” has become a kind of moral deodorant.

People spray it all over their work and hope no one will notice:

that their fanart is just the same three expressions on the same three character types;

that their big original project is structurally indistinguishable from a standard Hogwarts self‑insert with the serial numbers filed off;

that the only reason they’re yelling about ethics is because for the first time, their favorite shortcuts aren’t the fastest ones anymore.

“I don’t use AI” doesn’t mean:

“I think deeply about what I’m making.”

“I take risks.”

“I build worlds instead of just repainting existing ones.”

It only means: “I chose a slower tool.”

Slow doesn’t equal profound. Sometimes slow just equals inefficient slop.

The uncomfortable truth is this:

An AI model can produce breathtaking, weird, risky work — in the hands of someone who actually wants that.

The same AI model can happily spit out endless blonde titty‑elves — for someone who thinks that’s the peak of imagination.

A pencil, a tablet, a brush can do the exact same two things.

Your choice of tool says nothing about your courage, your taste, or your willingness to think. It only says something about your relationship to process.

If your whole identity is “I suffer more, therefore my work is better”, I have bad news: Suffering is not a reliable proxy for quality. You can suffer endlessly over something that was doomed to be slop from the moment you chickened out of trying a new idea.

There is one sentence that actually means something:

I try not to make slop.

Not “I don’t use AI.” Not “everything I do is hand-drawn.” Not “I only write original fiction.”

Just: “I take responsibility for whether my work adds anything beyond more warm, recycled mush to the cultural feeding trough.”

That sentence holds you accountable no matter what you use:

If you’re writing Hogwarts fic, you ask: Is this actually a new angle, or just the same trauma fanservice re-skinned?

If you’re drawing fanart, you ask: Does this do more than paste a face onto a meme template?

If you’re using AI, you ask: Am I pushing this beyond ‘sexy elf, again’ into something that would be impossible or impractical otherwise?

Slop is a content problem, not a technology problem. And yes, pencilslop is absolutely a thing.