Generative AI and AI Slop

We often see people complaining about AI-generated content and what has become known as "AI slop". In many cases, we understand exactly what they mean. Generic images generated with little thought, no quality control and no connection to the organisation using them can quickly become repetitive and uninspiring.

Years ago, before generative AI became widely available, one of our volunteers was not only one of our best technicians but also an exceptionally talented Photoshop artist. Every laptop, PC and device we sold had its own custom artwork created by hand. The results were fantastic, but producing hundreds of individual images consumed a huge amount of time that could otherwise have been spent repairing computers, helping customers and supporting our community projects.

As a technology-focused organisation, we looked for a better way.

Our Chairman built a local image generation system based on Stable Diffusion, heavily customised and refined using our historic artwork and branding. It runs on our own hardware and has been developed over many years to produce artwork that remains consistent with The Nerd Herd's visual identity.

The result is that when you see a Nerd Herd image, it isn't a random AI-generated picture. It's artwork created using a system specifically designed to reflect our established style, colours, themes and branding.

Yes, the majority of our recent images are AI generated. We don't hide that fact. But the purpose was never to replace creativity or flood social media with generic content. The purpose was to automate a time-consuming task so our volunteers could focus on what they do best: refurbishing computers, teaching STEM skills, preserving technology and helping people.

There is another side to this conversation that many people never see.

Over the last several years we have also developed our own video restoration system called MooViAI.

When we digitise old VHS tapes, Video8, Hi8, VHS-C and other analogue formats, we don't simply put the tape into a machine and press record. Analogue video is messy. Every recorder has slightly different head alignment, tracking characteristics and signal recovery capabilities. One machine may recover details that another misses.

Our workflow captures the same tape through multiple machines and multiple passes. MooViAI then synchronises those captures together and analyses the recovered signal from each source. Rather than generating new content, it identifies which machine has recovered the best information for each part of each frame and combines that data to produce the highest quality restoration possible from the original recording.

As far as we are aware, this approach is unique to The Nerd Herd.

There are many restoration services now using purely generative AI systems to recreate missing detail. While those tools can sometimes produce impressive results, they can also hallucinate information, creating faces, textures, lettering and objects that never existed in the original footage.

Our philosophy is different.

We are not trying to invent history.

We are trying to recover it.

MooViAI is designed to remain as faithful as possible to the original recording, using the best available interpretation of the real signal captured from the tape rather than generating entirely new content.

For us, AI is at its most useful when it helps recover and preserve reality, not replace it.

Technology has always changed the way we work. We use power tools instead of hand saws. We use spreadsheets instead of ledgers. We use diagnostic software instead of spending hours manually testing hardware.

For us, AI is simply another tool.

The computers are still refurbished by real people.

The STEM sessions are still delivered by real people.

The advice still comes from real people.

The media restorations are still overseen by real people.

The community support still comes from real people.

The AI just helps us work smarter and spend more time doing the things that matter.