New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways that did not have technological pathways before

Marcus Bösch with a really interesting insight into the aesthetics of TikTok through the use of some weird examples. He uses the work of Steyerl (2023), Meyer (2025), and Toister & Zylinska (2025) to explain it all. Well worth clicking through and reading the whole thing. Slop strategies have been evolving ever since Jesus sat down on a huge shrimp in 2024. AI content production is now sophisticated enough to invent new affective hooks that did not previously exist. New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways that did not have technological pathways before. […] Roland Meyer argues that AI-generated images are optimised not against the real world but against other images already in circulation. They are trained on billions of platform images and rewarded for matching what viewers already expect to see. Meyer, building on a term from Jacob Birken, calls this platform realism — a realism that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with…