{"id":156886,"date":"2025-11-24T10:54:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T10:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/156886\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T10:54:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T10:54:10","slug":"film-critics-are-great-and-insufferable-because-theyre-human-ai-critics-are-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/156886\/","title":{"rendered":"Film critics are great \u2013 and insufferable \u2013 because they\u2019re human. AI critics are nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s too modest for a byline, let alone a profile photo, but I\u2019ve 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\u2019s Blue Valentine<\/a> (2010) to All the President\u2019s 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\u2019m actively hating the guy. Or rather, this pastiche, whoever or whatever<\/a> he is.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wrongheaded or mean-spirited \u2013 the usual character flaws of the critic \u2013 but because he\u2019s 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. \u201cThis is not just a great American thriller,\u201d he will write about pretty much any well-regarded American thriller. \u201cIt is one of the all-time great films about America, period.\u201d Most of all, I hate him because I briefly believed<\/a> he was real, and then felt cheated and creeped out. So in hating Josh-or-Zack, I\u2019m probably hating myself a bit, too.<\/p>\n

Like the movies, AI<\/a> slop comes in different genres. AI-generated film criticism \u2013 let\u2019s call it slopicism \u2013 is surely on the milder, more vanilla end of the scale, assuming that Josh-or-Zack doesn\u2019t have a side hustle as an adoring sexbot or a concerned American patriot \u2013 which, come to think of it, he almost certainly does. Nonetheless, he\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> has described as \u201cfeed experience\u201d, which sounds like a polite way of saying that it gives the illusion of substance. Who cares that it\u2019s tasteless and superficial and barely fills you up? There\u2019ll be another heaped helping a click or two down the line.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a> (1941) and The Seven Samurai (1954), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Interstellar (2014). On some mini-essays he\u2019ll 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. \u201cThat wasn\u2019t acting,\u201d he\u2019ll whisper. \u201cThat was being.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s as though they\u2019ve all seen nirvana. \u201cOh my God, you\u2019ve perfectly expressed what\u2019s so special about this heartbreaking film,\u201d they\u2019ll tell him. \u201cThanks to your gorgeous writing, I\u2019ll never look at Forrest Gump the same way again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conceivably, these readers are all bots themselves, though I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s a comfort. It doesn\u2019t 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\u2019m guessing nowhere good. Spend too long in the company of the Josh-or-Zack blob \u2013 gorged on low-grade content, unsure what is real and what\u2019s not \u2013 and one starts to feel out of sorts, out of joint, as though you\u2019re the weird alien and everyone else is the local. Just lately I\u2019ve been watching Pluribus<\/a>, Vince Gilligan<\/a>\u2019s 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\u2019s not just a show about a scary dystopian future, it\u2019s a show about the scary reality of our real world today. <\/p>\n

\"Tim<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Tim Robbins in \u2018The Shawshank Redemption\u2019, a favourite of AI critics (Warner Bros)<\/p>\n

So far, at least, AI slopicism hasn\u2019t 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\u2019re 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

To put it more bluntly, if processed slop shows us anything, it\u2019s 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\u2019s so. Critics suck because they\u2019re human. They err because they\u2019re divine. As for the ways that they suck, that\u2019s their signature style, their King Arthur\u2019s sword \u2013 possibly a buoyancy aid, too, as the digital waters close in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The algorithm has sent a precocious film critic to bug me. This critic is young, knows his stuff,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-156886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}