From The Atlantic on Trump frying fries:
The images of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt—in which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterday—are uncanny. There’s Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonald’s kitchen, the interplay between the sheen of the stainless steel and the cast of the nugget-warming lights, give the very real photos a distinct Midjourney aesthetic. These pictures immediately reminded me of the viral, glossy AI-generated images of Trump being arrested and thrown in jail that started circulating in the spring of 2023.
Perhaps it’s because my feeds have been simultaneously clogged with election-season garbage and AI-generated slop, but the McDonald’s photoshoot struck me as a moment of strange synthesis, where reality and tech-enabled fiction felt somehow mashed together by the internet’s cultural particle accelerator. Trump proffering Dollar Menu items isn’t AI, but it is still slop in all the ways that matter: a hastily staged depiction of a fairly stupid, though entertaining fantasy, meant to delight, troll, and, most important, emphasize a false impression of the candidate.
This is clarifying, insofar that it demonstrates that Trump’s primary output is always a kind of slop. Slop, as it relates to AI, is loosely defined as spammy, cheap blocks of text, video, or images, quickly generated by computer programs for mass distribution. But nonsynthetic slop is everywhere too. What is a Trump rally but a teleprompter reading of stump-speech slop, interspersed with inexplicable lorem ipsum about Hannibal Lecter and wind turbines spun up by the unknowable language model in Trump’s own head? What are Trump’s tweets and Truth Social shitposts if not slop morsels, hurled into the internet’s ether for the rest of us to react to? And what is the Trump campaign producing if not fantastical propaganda intended to conjure a false image of Joe Biden’s America as a dark, dangerous place on the verge of destruction, besieged by immigrants, and savable only by one heroic man? (For instance, earlier today, Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself as a buff Pittsburgh Steelers lineman.) The McDonald’s photo op was barely real: The restaurant was closed to the public during Trump’s visit. He ignored a question about the minimum wage. Only prescreened customers were allowed in the drive-through, and those customers were not able to place orders—they just took whatever Trump handed to them. Like any good AI slop, the op illustrated a fantasy—in this case, that Trump, a man who has long lived in a gilded penthouse, is a working-class man.
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