> If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop?
It can be. Trademark infringement, diluting the value of your style by doing a lot of "you but if you were just generally worse".
Right now it's still fair to describe as "slop": enough mediocrity in the free models, not enough interest in quality and saying "no, do it better" from the people using them.
That doesn't preclude actual artists who do say "no, do better" from getting much better results. For example here's something which fooled me even a year ago because the… I don't want to say "creator", but "director" might work… put in the effort to reject bad outputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIB9uwIhfA
If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop?
It's interesting to see the definitions of terms like "slop" and "vibe coding" evolve in real time.