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. It seemed like success in film criticism was synonymous with volume. You have to be Loud to Win. Conversations that could have excavated something real about a film often turned into a night at the Colosseum. If I want to be pessimistic, I would say that we live in a world where the discussion of cinema is trending towards sterilization and fascist binaries (pass-or-fail scores that treat movies like sports betting). Early reactions to a film tend to focus more on its awards chances rather than how the critic responded to the film. 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 classic lazy template opener for any wedding speech. I used it in this essay on purpose, as a joke, because I am very smart and love irony. But in this specific case, I am not enjoying the irony. I am a victim of Big Dictionary and FilmSlop has become a victim of irony in that we are watching our name get redefined in real time, getting colonized by something that stands for the exact opposite of everything we champion.
The dictionary definition of "slop" is a new one, but the cultural rot that it symbolizes has been festering for years, long before generative AI tools became widely accessible. Before large language models were scraping the internet for writing styles to ape (bastardize), the ecosystem of film criticism was already being strip-mined for parts. We are currently watching 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 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. Everything is becoming Podcast and Tiktok.
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 both the reader and the writer to use film to challenge their perceptions of their lived experience. Instead, we are edging closer towards a world of frictionless content. The purpose of the review has become flattened into “good vs. bad.” It’s becoming harder to find reviews that actually force you to sit with your vulnerability and use film as a vessel to understand the world around us. So, of course, it makes sense that we are inundated with the slop of the AI era. These algorithms produce empty writing because they have been trained on the kind of empty writing that the content economy had already selected for us.
This is why we will continue to fight under the banner of "slop." I refuse to monetize this website, and I refuse to bend my knee to the algorithm. This pigsty is my home and I will continue to build in the dirt. The algorithmic definition of "slop" is grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of what engaging with art is. To a machine, a film review looks like a data set containing surface level descriptors of a film. But to us, criticism is an extension of our own lived experience. ChatGPT can successfully (and it will continue to get better) replicate the cadence of a sentence, but it cannot experience the film that inspired that sentence. It will never be able to sit in an AMC and feel patriotic when Nicole Kidman and the Coca Cola dance bless the luscious silver screen. It cannot come to terms with its faith, sexuality, or any other piece of its identity through a film because it has no identity. Machines can come up with infinite descriptions of any emotion, but they will never be able to feel those emotions.
There is an unbridgeable gap between recognizing a pattern and feeling a sensation. That gap is where this publication lives. We believe the value of writing about film lives outside of syntax and within interpretation. Great writing finds its merit beyond any technical assessment or hyperbolic opinion. We believe in the slop of the human experience and the confusing / irreducibly complex reaction that occurs when art mixes with life. Merriam-Webster can colonize our word and make it synonymous with algorithmic nonsense. That’s okay with me. We will continue holding fast and steady to our original definition. We will stay with our slop because we believe that in a world that is optimizing itself toward a gray perfection, the most beautiful thing you can be is imperfectly 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 views and likes
A refusal to be sterilized (i.e., what happens when art is felt rather than processed)