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LM: #328: The Pre-Algorithmite Bloggerhood
The term “slop” has been floating around. Most often, it’s called “AI slop,” but slop has been around for centuries.
The original slop rebels were a group of kids who, incredibly, made a mark on art history. They were in their upper teens and early twenties, and were meeting secretly in their homes and studios in central London.
They were students at the Royal Academy of Art, which had a dominant influence on what was considered “good” art. They quietly leaked their existence at the Academy’s Summer Exhibition by signing their paintings with their group’s initials after their names: “P.R.B.”
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They attracted the ire of none other than Charles Dickens, who published a screed mocking their “mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting” work.
They called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Despite their name, they actually worshipped the Renaissance master, Raphael. What they had a problem with was how the style of painting Raphael had perfected had become a formula that the Academy passed down, making all the “good” art look the same.
Kind of like how our current iteration of AI-generated art and writing is formulaically derived by a mathematically-average ideal of what people consider “good.”
This is so perfect you’re going to think I’m making this up, but they referred to the formulaic art by a term they invented based upon the name of the late founder of the Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. They called him “Sir Sloshua,” and the soulless, unoriginal work promoted by the academy, “slosh.”
The P.R.B. felt the formulaic approach had disconnected artists from reality. Their early doctrines – yes, this group of young punks had doctrines – called for artists to “have genuine ideas to express,” “study Nature attentively,” and be inspired by previous art only through what is “direct and serious and heartfelt,” ignoring what is “conventional and self-parading and learned by rote.”
The result in the painting Dickens hated so much was Jesus as a little boy in the carpentry workshop of his parents. An old woman’s hands were swollen and a man’s arms were hairy, veiny, and sunburnt. Jesus himself was, according to Dickens, a “hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy.”
In only a few short years of their official existence, the P.R.B. made declarations that echoed throughout not just painting, but literature and design, inspiring the Arts and Crafts movement, Oscar Wilde, and the fantasy worlds and characters of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, we need the Pre-Algorithmite Bloggerhood. AI slop is just another step on a path that has existed since Academic art, and that descended sharply with the dawn of the algorithm, which has determined what is “good” by the formulaic application of whatever can be measured as interesting in the eyes of the lowest common denominator.
So write (or otherwise create) based upon your actual observations and feelings. Abandon slop-purveying rubrics such as niches, hashtags, and personal brands. Create something that is real and honest and beautiful.
Maybe 175 years from now they’ll be writing about a different P.R.B.
Book: Four Thousand Weeks (Amazon) is full of mind-benders about the nature of time and what it means to be productive.
Cool: Merlin helps you identify birds.
Best,
David
P.S. I shared a reel about the P.R.B. on Substack, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok.
