Redefining Slop
Three years ago, my friend George Iskander and I started our own film review site. Our goal was to create something through which we could tangibly express our love for the movies, and something that challenged the understanding of media criticism and prioritized self-reflection over technicality. In that process, we found our identity tethered to a style of criticism that felt almost autobiographical. Our work is rooted in the belief that you can learn more about a person by how art impacts them than through almost any other form of conversation. FilmSlop was born out of our shared belief in what film can do to help us better understand the human condition. As such, we've built a corner of the internet in which budding film critics can express their lived experience alongside their technical criticism.
FilmSlop was also born out of frustration. We started the site as a response to patterns of media consumption. When we looked at the landscape of film criticism, we found that the loudest voices were either riding the steamroller of consensus or waging war against anyone who stepped off it. Conversations that could have excavated something real about a film often turned into a night at the Colosseum. In our most pessimistic view, we saw a world where the discussion of cinema trended toward sterilization, binary metrics, and pass-or-fail scores that treated movies as products to be appraised instead of instruments of connection. FilmSlop became our response, and in that pursuit of imperfection, we adopted "slop" as our mascot. "Slop" became our word, our ethos, our mission, our reason for doing any of this. For three years, this has been our sanctuary for the idiosyncratic (dare I say, sloppy haha) nature of loving movies. The concept of slop mythologizes our way of communicating a genuine love for the trough. Our website, to me, is a rejection of the idea that art needs to be clean or optimized to be valuable.
This week, Merriam-Webster selected "slop" as its 2025 word of the year, which is great for our SEO but terrible for our brand. Webster's dictionary defines "slop" as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."
Normally, I love irony. After all, I was forged in the fires of the millennial-Gen Z cusp. I'll take any opportunity to hide behind the crutch of irony. In fact, when I quoted Webster's dictionary a couple of sentences ago, I was doing the most AI-coded move available to a writer. "Webster's dictionary defines" is the load-bearing opener of every machine-generated wedding speech ever inflicted on a reception hall, and I deployed it on purpose, as a joke, because I am very smart and ironic. But in this specific case, I am not enjoying the irony. FilmSlop has become a victim of irony in that we are watching our name get redefined in real time as the exact opposite of everything we champion.
The dictionary definition of "slop" is new, but the cultural rot it points towards has been festering for years, even before AI tools became widely accessible. As a creative society, we are experiencing the terminal stage of a genealogy that started with the slow dismantling of the critical apparatus itself. Long before the large language models began scraping the internet for patterns to bastardize, the ecosystem of film writing was already being strip-mined for parts. We are currently watching this happen as legacy institutions continue their retreat from the front lines of culture: this year, Vanity Fair eliminated its senior chief critic position, and the Chicago Tribune, the very same paper that once gave Gene Siskel a platform to influence culture at a national level through film criticism, cut its film critic post entirely.
You reap what you sow. In this specific case, we contribute to an internet economy (sow) that rewards art when it gets converted into content (reap). It's what happens when you live in a world that worships at the altar of efficiency and treats the audience's patience and focus as a defect to be engineered away. We have killed our religion in favor of optimization. Movie Pope Martin Scorsese warned us that obsession with box office totals and metrics was devaluing cinema to the level of a consumer product. We have been successfully conditioned to accept a generic slurry of shiny pictures and sounds designed to arrest the eye for a fraction of a cent (exhibit A). It was only a matter of time before those in power demanded a machine to automate its production.
The personal essay has become an endangered species because it often refuses to optimize. In the age of ninety-second reels where a director's filmography shares the screen with a clip of Subway Surfers to keep the dopamine receptors from flatlining, or when TV is written with the goal of allowing the viewer to check their phone while they watch, using a film to examine your own life feels like an act of defiance. Perhaps I am assigning FilmSlop a false sense of importance and overdramatizing my positioning of this tiny homegrown website as the last bastion of honor against the machine, but FilmSlop is my way of clinging to what I love in an ever-devolving world.
Collectively, it feels as though we are moving away from the kind of criticism that asks something of the reader and edging closer toward a world of frictionless information. So, of course, it makes sense that the natural evolution in this trajectory is the slop of the AI era, a perfect and hollow mimicry of human expression that contains all of the syntax and none of the soul. When you spend years training an industry to produce frictionless content, you eventually invent the machines that can produce it without humans; the algorithms learned from exactly the kind of writing the internet had already selected for us.
This distinction is precisely what keeps us fighting under the banner of our "slop." We have made a home in our pigsty and will build in the dirt. The algorithmic definition of "slop" is grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of what criticism actually is. To a machine, a film review is a data set containing adjectives related to cinematography, a summary of plot points, and a sentiment score. But to a human, criticism is a reflection of our own lived experience. ChatGPT can replicate the cadence of a sentence, but it cannot experience the film that inspired that sentence. It cannot sit in an AMC and feel patriotic when Nicole Kidman graces the silver screen. It cannot bond with a friend over their shared love of a film. It cannot come to terms with its faith, sexuality, or any other piece of its identity through a film because it has no identity. The machine can generate a description of (and even successfully mimic) an emotion, but it will never be able to generate the experience of it.
That unbridgeable gap between recognizing a pattern and feeling a sensation is where this publication lives. We believe the value of writing about film lives in the mess of interpretation, beyond any technical assessment or verdict on whether a film is "good" or "bad." We believe in the slop of the human experience and the confusing and irreducibly complex reaction that occurs when art meets life. Merriam-Webster can use our word to document the way the world is tilting toward the sludge of content generation, and they can use it to catalogue the digital waste of the machine age. But we are holding fast to our original meaning. We are staying in the trough because we are committed to the belief that in a world optimizing itself toward a gray perfection, the most radical thing you can be is messy and human and alive.
slop /släp/ noun
The messy and unpolished intersection of a piece of art and a human life
Critical writing that prioritizes the vulnerability of the author over the optimization of the algorithm
A refusal to be sterilized; what happens when art is felt rather than merely processed