“The internet is increasingly polluted by AI-generated text, images and video,” the site argues a new browser extension called Slop Dodger. It promises to use Google’s search API “to only show content published before November 30, 2022” — the day ChatGPT launched — “so you can be sure it was written or produced by the human hand.”404 Media calls it ‘a scorched earth approach’ virtually guarantees that your searches will go smoothly.”
Slop Evader was created by an artist and researcher This brainwho says she was motivated by growing dismay over the tech industry’s relentless, aggressive rollout of so-called “generative AI” – despite widespread criticism and the general public’s distaste for it. “This sowing of distrust in our relationship with the media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment that we are in,” Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality in a sea of artificial online clutter. “I’ve been thinking about ways to decline it, and the easiest and dumbest way to do that is to only look before 2022….”
Currently, Slop Evader can be used to search pre-GPT archives from seven different sites where slop has become common, including YouTube, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and the parenting site MumsNet. The obvious downside to this, from a user perspective, is that you won’t be able to find anything time-sensitive or current – including this website, which didn’t exist in 2022. The experience is at once refreshing and gripping, allowing you to surf freely without having to constantly question reality, but always knowing that this freedom will be forever locked in time – nostalgia for a human-centric world wide web that no longer exists.
Of course, the limitations of the tool are part of its provocation. Brain says it plans to add support for more sites and release a new version that uses DuckDuckGo’s search indexing instead of Google’s. But the real goal, she says, is to get people to ask how they can collectively reject the dystopian, inhumane version of the Internet that Silicon Valley’s AI pushers have foisted on us… With enough cultural backlash, Brain suggests, we could start to see alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo adding options to filter out search results suspected of synthetic content (DuckDuckGo added the option to filter out AI images were looked up earlier this year)… But whatever form AI slop rejection takes, it will have to be a group effort.
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