'Not The Slop Paper' – When Your Kitchen's Perfect Wallpaper Turns Out To Be AI Slop

Imagine being so absorbed in the task of applying wallpaper — lining up the edges perfectly, making sure the pattern continues from roll to roll — that you miss a major design flaw until you've stepped back to inspect your work. Once you do, your jaw drops: The classy arts and crafts-style scene on the paper is rife with absurd errors. Rowboats float through trees, country cottages have incomplete roofs, and, horror of horrors, unclothed men are shown dashing into bushes. Do you settle for making lemonade from this bumper crop of lemons, or do you lodge a complaint to the seller? Is this just another case of "caveat emptor"? Buyer beware when purchasing wallpaper online, because it might be AI slop.

TikToker Violet Clair was in this exact predicament after papering her kitchen with a blue and white toile wallpaper depicting vintage country scenery she ordered from Etsy. With the last roll trimmed and smoothed perfectly in place, she was aghast to see shoddy, incomplete images along with downright ridiculous ones.

There definitely are good ways to elevate your space with the help of artificial intelligence, but poorly executed AI designs made with quantity, not quality, in mind have become a common phenomenon. Wallpapers with illogical mistakes like these are evidence that a discerning human eye never gave it a once-over before greenlighting the product. The flurry of comments following Violet Clair's post ranges from frustration to glee that someone would end up with such a product. While the majority of the opinions were deeply negative toward the vendor, others saw the humor in having an unintentionally hilarious kitchen upgrade. "I think it's a great talking point," one commenter wrote.

The quality of AI is improving by the day, so much so that it's sometimes hard to know whether an image is real or artificially generated. At this point, there don't appear to be consistent requirements across platforms for disclaimers that an image was created with AI. And when buying wallpaper, you may notice that AI-generated products are becoming the norm. Importantly, Etsy does claim to require sellers to disclose these, but after inspecting a few advertisements for inexpensive patterned wallpaper on the site, it wasn't easy to find out whether the product images were AI-generated.

Even though there's no mention of what Clair paid for her wallpaper, Etsy is packed to the gills with low-priced, adorable products that look similar. Many of these toile-style wallpapers on Etsy are lovely at first glance, and their low prices have shoppers filling baskets with rolls by the dozen. A scattering of participants on Violet Clair's thread shared the opinion that you get what you deserve from buying an inexpensive product, while others were more sympathetic. "I would actually demand a refund," one wrote.

Adding to the ordeal, one keyword on a good number of Etsy sellers' pages for patterned wallpaper is "William Morris." This 19th-century British artist started the now-historic wallpaper trend of handmade nature-inspired prints, and he was an activist in favor of craftsmanship over the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. A commenter on Clair's video pointed out the irony of possibly AI-generated wallpaper bearing the "William Morris" tag, when the lack of craftsmanship in these products is exactly what Morris spoke out against. "William Morris is rolling in his grave," the commenter quipped.