Beyond the Scroll: Museums, AI, and the Value of Attention

In the year 2025, it’s impossible to avoid endlessly scrolling social media feeds filled with uncanny AI faces, hyper-saturated ads that seem stitched together by bots, and videos so strange you can’t quite remember why you watched them. The content blurs together. The feed keeps going.

There is now a word for this digital glut. Merriam-Webster has declared “slop” its Word of the Year for 2025, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” In announcing the choice, the dictionary’s editors pointed to a surge of AI images and fake news that look nearly real, describing the term as deliberately evocative of something unpleasant and unwanted.

Low-quality content has always existed online, from spam emails to clickbait headlines, but 2025 marks a shift in scale. Generative AI has made it possible to produce enormous quantities of plausible-looking material at minimal cost, and platforms are increasingly designed to distribute that material as efficiently as possible. OpenAI’s Sora, a text-to-video generator released this year, allows users to create short, highly realistic videos from simple prompts. The consequence? Content that circulates fast because it is cheap to make and made to grab attention. The result is a digital torrent that is built around rapid engagement and infinite scrolling.

As AI’s reach has expanded, so has its presence — particularly in the art world, sparking one of the most heated cultural debates of the year. In early 2025, Christie’s — the century-old auction house synonymous with fine art — held its first major sale dedicated to AI art, titled “Augmented Intelligence.” The event brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars and featured works by artists using AI as a creative tool, but it also ignited widespread protest. More than 6,000 artists signed a petition demanding the auction be canceled, arguing that the models used to generate these works were trained on copyrighted art without consent and that the sale legitimized what some critics have called “mass theft.” The controversy thrust questions of authorship, ownership, and artistic value into the center of mainstream art discourse.

For many critics and audience members alike, the issue runs deeper than market value at an auction. Commentators have argued that when artwork is invented by a machine, it loses its capacity to foster genuine connection. The Guardian columnist Eric Reinhart wrote that AI art risks disconnecting viewers from the lived experiences and emotional labor that underlie traditional artmaking, and that substituting human creativity with algorithmic “slop” can leave audiences feeling isolated from the real world.

These debates have forced museums and galleries to confront their roles in a world where generative algorithms can produce endless images at the click of a button. Unsurprisingly, many are struggling to know where to draw the line between “human” and “AI” art. The San Francisco International Airport Museum’s May exhibition, “Women of Afrofuturism,” which included AI-assisted portraits by Boston-based artist Nettrice Gaskins, recently drew criticism online with some viewers dismissing the work as “AI slop.” Gaskins responded by emphasizing that she uses AI as one tool among many, and that her art is grounded in human creativity, not solely based on machines. Curators at the airport also defended the show’s integrity, pointing to positive visitor feedback.

These tensions reflect a deeper contradiction at the heart of the AI art debate. On one hand, young collectors and some artists are drawn to AI’s possibilities, seeing it as a tool that introduces new forms of expression. On the other hand, many artists and critics worry that generative art undermines the labor and individual vision traditionally associated with art.

In this climate, museums have a unique role. They can highlight the new possibilities AI brings to art, showing works that explore collaboration between humans and machines. At the same time, they must create exhibitions that encourage viewers to slow down and think. Labels, wall texts, and curatorial explanations are all important in helping people understand why a work matters, not just that it exists — a distinction often overlooked in “AI slop.”

Indeed, some institutions have actually embraced AI as a subject of artistic inquiry rather than a threat. For instance, the exhibition “Inanimate” at Hundred Years Gallery in London — which brought together the art of seven cutting-edge artists — explored the boundary between human and machine, using multimedia work to question how intimacy and technology intermix in an age shaped by what many call “living in a simulation.” Rather than presenting AI as a replacement for human creativity, “Inanimate” framed it as a tool that challenges audiences to reflect on what is uniquely human, and what is co-created in the space between human ideas and algorithms.

Perhaps this is why art spaces feel more urgent now than ever. If slop names our collective exhaustion, art reminds us that attention and reflection still matter. The challenge for museums and cultural institutions is not simply to resist AI, but to define what makes something meaningful in a moment when machines can generate nearly anything. AI can and perhaps should be incorporated into exhibitions, not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a lens through which one can see it. After all, museums have always reflected the artifacts that define a period, and AI is undeniably part of the cultural landscape of 2025.

In this sense, AI need not threaten the value of art. By curating experiences — as “Inanimate” did — that emphasize human judgement behind the machine, museums can show that creativity is about meaning, not speed. In the end, the challenge is clear: Integrate innovation, yes, but always in a way that invites reflection. Anything less risks letting slop, rather than artistic intention, become the defining aesthetic of our time.