Pissed-off Fans Flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit With AI Slop To Protest Its AI Policies
People on r/twinpeaks flooded the subreddit with AI slop images of FBI agent Dale Cooper and ChatGPT generated scripts after the community’s moderators opened the door to posting AI art. The tide of terrible Twin Peaks related slop lasted for about two days before the subreddit’s mods broke, reversed their decision, and deleted the AI generated content.
Twin Peaks is a moody TV show that first aired in the 1990s and was followed by a third season in 2017. It’s the work of surrealist auteur David Lynch, influenced lots of TV shows and video games that came after and has a passionate fan base that still shares theories and art to this day. Lynch died earlier this year and since his passing he’s become a talking point for pro-AI art people who point to several interviews and second hand stories they claim show Lynch had embraced an AI-generated slop future.
On Tuesday, a mod posted a long announcement that opened the doors to AI on the sub. In a now deleted post titled “Ai Generated Content On r/twinpeaks,” the moderator outlined the position that the sub was a place for everyone to share memes, theories, and “anything remotely creative as long as it has a loose string to the show or its case or its themes. Ai generated content is included in all of this.”
The post went further. “We are aware of how Ai ‘art’ and Ai generated content can hurt real artists,” the post said. “Unfortunately, this is just the reality of the world we live in today. At this point I don’t think anything can stop the Ai train from coming, it’s here and this is only the beginning. Ai content is becoming harder and harder to identify.”
The mod then asked Redditors to follow an honor system and label any post that used AI with a special new flair so people could filter out those posts if they didn’t want to see them. “We feel this is a best of both worlds compromise that should keep everyone fairly happy,” the mod said.
An honor system, a flair, and a filter did not mollify the community. In the following 48 hours Lynch fans expressed their displeasure by showing r/twinpeaks what it looks like when no one can “stop the Ai train from coming.” They filled the subreddit with AI-generated slop in protest, including horrifying pictures of series protagonist Cooper doing an end-zone dance on a football field while Laura Palmer screamed in the sky and more than a few awful ChatGPT generated scripts.
Free-IDK-Chicken, a former mod of r/twinpeaks who resigned over the AI debacle, said the post wasn’t run by other members of the mod team. “It was poorly worded. A bad take on a bad stance and it blew up in their face,” she told 404 Media. “It spiraled because it was condescending and basically told the community--we don’t care that it’s theft, that it’s unethical, we’ll just flair it so you can filter it out…they missed the point that AI art steals from legit artists and damages the environment.”
According to Free-IDK-Chicken, the subreddit’s mods had been fighting over whether or not to ban AI art for months. “I tried five months ago to get AI banned and was outvoted. I tried again last month and was outvoted again,” she said.
On Thursday morning, with the subreddit buried in AI slop, the mods of r/twinpeaks relented, banned AI art, and cleaned up the protest spam. “After much thought and deliberation about the response to yesterday's events, the TP Mod Team has made the decision to reverse their previous statement on the posting of AI content in our community,” the mods said in a post announcing the new policy. “Going forward, posts including generative AI art or ChatGPT-style content are disallowed in this subreddit. This includes posting AI google search results as they frequently contain misinformation.”
Lynch has become a mascot for pro AI boosters. An image on a pro-AI art subreddit depicts Lynch wearing an OpenAI shirt and pointing at the viewer. “You can’t be punk and also be anti-AI, AI-phobic, or an AI denier. It’s impossible!” reads a sign next to the AI-generated picture of the director.
As evidence, they point to aBritish Film Institute interview published shortly before his death where he lauds AI and calls it “incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity.” AI boosters often leave off the second part of the quote. “I’m sure with all these things, if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror. But I’m hoping better times are coming,” Lynch said.
The other big piece of evidence people use to claim Lynch was pro-AI is a secondhand account given to Vulture by his neighbor, the actress Natasha Lyonne. According to the interview in Vulture, Lyonne asked Lynch for his thoughts on AI and Lynch picked up a pencil and told her that everyone has access to it and to a phone. “It’s how you use the pencil. You see?” He said.
Setting aside the environmental and ethical arguments against AI-generated art, if AI is a “pencil,” most of what people make with it is unpleasant slop. Grotesque nonsense fills our social media feeds and AI-generated Jedis and Ghiblis have become the aesthetic of fascism.
We've seen other platforms and communities struggle with keeping AI art at bay when they've allowed it to exist alongside human-made content. On Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, low-effort garbage is flooding online spaces and pushing productive human conversation to the margins, while floating to the top of engagement algorithms.
Other artist communities are pushing back against AI art in their own ways: Earlier this month, DragonCon organizers ejected a vendor for displaying AI-generated artwork. Artists’ portfolio platform ArtStation banned AI-generated content in 2022. And earlier this year, artists protested the first-ever AI art auction at Christie’s.
Artists Are Revolting Against AI Art on ArtStation
Artists are fed up with AI art on the portfolio platform, which is owned by Epic Games, but the company isn't backing down.Chloe Xiang (VICE)
The AI Slop Presidency
Trump has found an aesthetic to define his second term: grotesque AI slop.Over the weekend, the Trump administration posted at least seven different pieces of AI generated or AI altered media, ranging from Trump imagining himself as a pope and a Star Wars Jedi (or Sith?) to Obama-esque “Hope” posters featuring people the administration has deported.
This has become the Slop Presidency, and AI-generated images are the perfect artistic medium for the Trump presidency. They're impulsively created, grotesque, and low-effort. Trumpworld’s fascination with slop is the logical next step for a President that, in his first term, regularly retweeted random memes created by his army of supporters on Discord or The Donald, a subreddit that ultimately became a Reddit-clone website after it was banned. AI allows his team to create media that would never exist otherwise, a particularly useful tool for a President and administration that has a hostile relationship with reality.
Trump’s original fascination with AI slop began last summer, after he said legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the cats…they’re eating the pets” in his debate with Kamala Harris. The internet’s AI slop factories began spinning up images of Trump as cat-and-dog savior. Since then, Trump and the administration have occasionally shared or reposted AI slop. In his first week in office, Trump shared an AI-generated “GM” car image that was promoting $TRUMP coin. “What a beautiful car. Congrats to GM!,” he posted.
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At the end of February, Trump shared a video on his Truth Social account that imagined a world where Gaza was turned into a Trump Casino.But this weekend, Trump began sharing AI slop on a level we’ve not seen before.
Trump’s AI-tinged weekend began on Friday night with a photo-realistic picture of himself as the Pope on his Truth Social account. The White House reposted a screenshot of the image on X, which pissed off the Catholic Church.
“This is deeply offensive to Catholics especially during this sacred time that we are still mourning the death of Pope Francis and praying for the guidance of the Holy Spirit for the election of our new Pope. He owes an apology,” Thomas Paprocki, an American Bishop in Illinois, said on X.During a press conference on Monday, Trump dismissed the accusation that the Trump Pope was offensive and then said he didn’t post it. “The Catholics loved it. I had nothing to do with it,” Trump said. “Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the Pope and they put it out on the internet,” Trump said. “That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it was AI. But I know nothing about it. I just saw it last evening.”
All political movements are accompanied by artists who translate the politics into pictures, writing, and music. Adolf Ziegler captured the Nazi ideal in paintings. Stalin’s Soviet Union churned out mass produced and striking propaganda posters that wanted citizens about how to live. The MAGA movement’s artistic aesthetic is AI slop and Donald Trump is its king. It is not concerned with convincing anyone or using art to inform people about its movement. It seeks only to upset people who aren’t on board and excite the faithful because it upsets people.
Not content to just aggravate Catholics, the Trump administration then used AI to offend adherents of another of America’s major religions: Star Wars fans. On May the 4th, the official White House X account posted an AI-generated image of a muscle bound Trump wielding a red light saber and flanked by two bald eagles.
“Happy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to to [sic] bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy. You’re not the Rebellion—you’re the Empire,” it said in the post. “May the 4th be with you.” As the replies pointed out, red light sabers are typically used by villains.
This was just one of a series of Star Wars related AI-generated cringe that went out from official Trump admin accounts over the weekend. DOD Rapid Response on X (an account that publishes propaganda on behalf of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth) posted a five minute video that contained a Star Wars intro style scroll of Trump’s “accomplishments” before treating viewers to a pic of Trump and Hegseth as Jedi. The account for the U.S. Army’s Pacific Command sent out an “AI-enhanced” image of soldiers doing a training exercise. Both of the soldiers’s weapons were replaced with lightsabers.
Trump and the people who created AI-image generators do not respect artists. There is no style that either will not exploit or sully. OpenAI reduced Hayao Miyazaki's life’s work to a gross meme, and the White House played along. For years the Lofi Girl has sat in windows on screens across the planet while people studied, read, and worked. Over the weekend the White House YouTube channel ran “Lo-Fi MAGA Video to Relax/ Study To” while an animated President Trump sat at a desk, mimicking the Lofi Girl.Maybe you don’t like Star Wars, are unmoved by Studio Ghibli films, or have never chilled to lofi beats. It doesn’t matter, the message is clear: if you love something Trump will pervert it. Nothing will be untouched. Sacred objects and beloved art exist only to be desecrated. AI has made that as easy as pushing a button.
AI generated slop content is part of a brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality and the Trump administration’s constant use of AI art reflects its own brute force attack on American democracy. It’s not just that its aesthetics are useful for Trump, its entire mode of being is useful for how his administration has governed so far, by brute forcing the Presidency with a slew of executive orders, budget cuts, attacks on institutions, and sloppily executed deportations. The strategy is to overwhelm the American bureaucracy and the legal system, and to exhaust his enemies with an endless stream of bullshit; by the time we shake out what’s legal and what’s not, much of the damage has already been done.
One of the wonderful things about making art is the process. A lot happens between conception and execution. An idea pops into an artist's head and it changes dramatically while they attempt to render that idea into reality. That doesn’t happen with AI-generated images. There is no creation process, there is only instant gratification. Whatever impulsive and grotesque thought pops into the mind of the creator can immediately be realized.
And so every revenge fantasy Trump and his followers ever wanted can be made real at a moment’s notice. On March 27, the White House X account posted a Ghibli-style AI image of a crying woman being arrested by ICE.
Here is a real woman who has been accused of a crime, her image appropriated by the state and rendered into a cartoon. America has total power over this woman. Arrested for drug trafficking, her image has been plastered all over the internet. She’ll be deported. Not content with total control over her body and future, the administration has made her into a caricature and invited its followers to mock her online.
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
