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Artificial intelligence has given rise to a new breed of movie pundit – one that gloms onto consensus opinion and regurgitates rote praise. Xan Brooks looks out at this new frontier of film criticism and despairs
Monday 24 November 2025 06:00 GMTComments
open image in galleryThe AI critic is an irksome presence, flooding the zone with his mediocre critiques, constantly trawling for clicks and likes (iStock)
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The algorithm has sent a precocious film critic to bug me. This critic is young, knows his stuff, and writes about classic movies on a range of cineaste-sounding websites. He’s too modest for a byline, let alone a profile photo, but I’ve read so much of his work that I can picture him in my head: an earnest, middle-class fanboy with a name like Sam, Josh or Zack. He writes verbose mini-essays on everything from Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010) to All the President’s Men (1976), and seemingly posts three or four times every day. His voluminous workrate puts my shabby trickle to shame. It has now reached the point where I’m actively hating the guy. Or rather, this pastiche, whoever or whatever he is.
Everybody hates critics, that goes with the territory, but there are specific live-button reasons to detest Josh-or-Zack. I hate him not because he’s wrongheaded or mean-spirited – the usual character flaws of the critic – but because he’s just the opposite: meekly consensual and minded not to give offence. I hate his blandly plausible posts, which always begin on a note of glib authority before sinking to a tone of hushed, vapid reverence. “This is not just a great American thriller,” he will write about pretty much any well-regarded American thriller. “It is one of the all-time great films about America, period.” Most of all, I hate him because I briefly believed he was real, and then felt cheated and creeped out. So in hating Josh-or-Zack, I’m probably hating myself a bit, too.
Like the movies, AI slop comes in different genres. AI-generated film criticism – let’s call it slopicism – is surely on the milder, more vanilla end of the scale, assuming that Josh-or-Zack doesn’t have a side hustle as an adoring sexbot or a concerned American patriot – which, come to think of it, he almost certainly does. Nonetheless, he’s an irksome presence, flooding the zone with his mediocre critiques, constantly trawling for clicks and likes; the embodiment of a trillion-dollar engagement farm that’s passing itself off as a series of enthusiast fan-sites. NewsGuard, a US-based ratings service, reckons that there are more than a thousand such accounts currently clamouring for our attention, each operating with little or no human oversight. These provide what Mark Zuckerberg has described as “feed experience”, which sounds like a polite way of saying that it gives the illusion of substance. Who cares that it’s tasteless and superficial and barely fills you up? There’ll be another heaped helping a click or two down the line.
Large language models lift from the work of real writers, smoothing spiky published prose into a kind of homogenised paste. That explains why Josh-or-Zack reads like a well-read undergraduate who’s never had an original thought in his life. AI, furthermore, is inherently conservative, because it is trained on groupthink and prone to confirmation bias. That explains why he loves Citizen Kane (1941) and The Seven Samurai (1954), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Interstellar (2014). On some mini-essays he’ll even park the glib criticism to recount awestruck behind-the-scenes titbits from the making of a classic motion picture. All of these tales essentially play out the same way. They involve the lead actor improvising a scene or a line for the camera, and everyone on the set being stunned and having to bite back their tears. Finally, one unnamed crew member will turn to a colleague. “That wasn’t acting,” he’ll whisper. “That was being.”
So what if I hate him? Josh-or-Zack does the job, earns the clicks, and judged on the most basic measure, slopicism might even qualify as good writing. Its grammar is sound and it delivers information. The evidence suggests that the readers seem to like it. When I wrote reviews on a regular basis, the below-the-line commenters mostly demanded that I be fired, or at least explain exactly how much I was paid for this travesty of a Batman review. Whereas when Josh-or-Zack posts a piece, it’s as though they’ve all seen nirvana. “Oh my God, you’ve perfectly expressed what’s so special about this heartbreaking film,” they’ll tell him. “Thanks to your gorgeous writing, I’ll never look at Forrest Gump the same way again.”
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Conceivably, these readers are all bots themselves, though I’m not sure that’s a comfort. It doesn’t make me rest any easier, and only lends weight to the dead internet theory, which suggests that the web is little more than a vast, self-policing echo chamber of ghosts. Who knows where this leads? I’m guessing nowhere good. Spend too long in the company of the Josh-or-Zack blob – gorged on low-grade content, unsure what is real and what’s not – and one starts to feel out of sorts, out of joint, as though you’re the weird alien and everyone else is the local. Just lately I’ve been watching Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s post-apocalyptic TV drama, which pits a furious human survivor against an ingratiating hive-mind. Pluribus is terrific, incidentally; do check it out if you can. As Josh-or-Zack might put it, it’s not just a show about a scary dystopian future, it’s a show about the scary reality of our real world today.
open image in galleryTim Robbins in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, a favourite of AI critics (Warner Bros)So far, at least, AI slopicism hasn’t changed or even challenged my view of any film. What it has shifted, quite seismically, is my view of film critics. I love them, they’re amazing, the whole sad, sorry bunch. Because real writers are flawed in the best possible way. Each has their own kinks and quirks, knee-jerk likes and dislikes, overused words and puns, and the more we read of their work, the more we come to know who they are. That’s been the case forever: we simply took it for granted until featureless Josh-or-Zack slid into our feeds, transforming their persistent flaws into virtues and their frailties into strengths.
To put it more bluntly, if processed slop shows us anything, it’s that the lowliest, barely literate hack blogger is worth a price above rubies and should be cherished at all costs, simply because they love some things and hate others, and are genuinely trying to explain why that’s so. Critics suck because they’re human. They err because they’re divine. As for the ways that they suck, that’s their signature style, their King Arthur’s sword – possibly a buoyancy aid, too, as the digital waters close in.
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