I keep seeing ads for gorilla sofas. It's something you can order, but the pictures and videos in the ads are AI slop. Clicking on them brings you to more AI slop. If someone spends the $7,000+, what happens? Does the JPG get sent to the workers in the factory who must then do their best? That's exactly what happens—just as when you buy AI-generated garments.
You see, we do want the AI slop gorilla sofa, the orders have come in, and now the sofas are being made.
In a video from Sun Yao / Foshan Furniture, a presenter shows off their real AI Gorilla Sofa.
"We have a client who wants a gorilla sofa. The thing is, it's AI," he says. "But in China everything is possible."
The resulting creation is a sofa in the shape of a gorilla, indubitably, but it lacks the luxuriantly uncanny realism of the AI slop "original". Perhaps not everything is possible in China after all. I feel that the sort of person buying one, though, might not be able to tell the difference between it and how it's depicted in the ads; such unseen discrepancies are the hell in other people.
There are "articles" about the sofa, themselves AI-generated. For example, here's one I archived at archive.is. In the following paragraph, I hazard that even the most simulation-adapted of boomers can sense the weird.
These gorilla couches are enveloped in luxurious faux fur, so soft and inviting that you might just forget about your traditional seating arrangements. The realistic texture adds an element of the wild, making it a perfect blend of nature and comfort.
The way the AI reaches to elaborate on and explain the "realistic texture," it buzzes like a fridge. And yet here it is: the insane slop our grandparents comment and like on has escaped Facebook. It is manifest.
You can even buy one on Amazon. Colonel Jessep voice: you're damned right I'm using my referral code!
Here's more video from the factory making the attempt, embedded below:
Looking forward to a William Gibson novel where someone has an AI-authentic slop-gorilla couch made at whatever incredible expense it would actually take.
