Browser Extension 'Slop Evader' Offers Escape from AI-Contaminated Internet

How to glimpse a pre-AI internet

A sizable portion of the internet has devolved into an AI-contaminated wasteland. While an easy solution remains elusive, a browser extension called Slop Evader offers a glimpse at what the internet used to be only a few short years ago. While always prone to innumerable hazards, the online ecosystem is degrading largely due to the misuse of generative artificial intelligence content. Increasingly referred to as AI slop, this digital pollution often takes the form of torrents of uncannily realistic, wholly fake images and videos. These have inundated some of the most commonly used social media platforms, while countless shell websites push untrustworthy articles and blog posts penned by AI programs. Often trained on uncompensated human labor, these sites routinely game popular search engines that now prioritize AI results. This allows unverified AI slop to rise to the top of many queries while simultaneously burying actually legitimate websites underneath a mountain of garbage links. It wasn't always like this. In fact, you can arguably trace the shift back to a single date: November 30, 2022. That's the day OpenAI debuted ChatGPT to the public, likely forever changing how we interact with the online world. Barely three years since its rollout, and it's already hard to remember the relative ease with which you could find answers to a search query -- or even simply trust the images and videos displayed in front of you. To help raise awareness to just how bad it's gotten, environmental engineer and artist Tega Brain created Slop Evader. After installing the extension on Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, users can employ it to search pre-AI archives on a handful of websites including Reddit and YouTube. "This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we're in," Brain told 404 Media in an interview published last week. "I've been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022." The AI slop's deteriorative effects may not only be affecting the internet itself. Earlier this year, an MIT Media Lab study suggested that large language model (LLM) products like essay writing assistants are actually rewiring users' brains. The resultant "cognitive debts" may even include weakened neural connectivity and damage memory retention, as well as wider "long-term educational implications." Slop Evader's capacities will likely remain extremely limited, not to mention it's impossible to provide any up-to-date information from after 2022. Even still, it starkly illustrates generative AI's disorienting effects on an internet-reliant society. If nothing else, you can be relatively confident that searching for recipes on Reddit via Slop Evader won't result in something like glue-laced pizza sauce.

This extension limits Google searches to the pre-ChatGPT era

Surf Google SERPs like it's November 29, 2022, with this workaround for the age of AI slop ChatGPT's public debut on November 30, 2022, is widely seen by critics as the start of the AI-slop era online. Those yearning for a more human-written web can get some relief from a browser extension that filters Google searches to pre-ChatGPT results. Slop Evader, published in late October by Australian artist, environmental engineer and tech critic Tega Brain, isn't a complicated bit of code, but it will make searching the pre-ChatGPT internet and some of its most popular sites a bit easier for you. Available for Chrome and Firefox, the extension itself is simple - so simple you could duplicate its features using Google search operators, which Brain acknowledges by calling it "just a convenience" on the extension's GitHub page. For those of us who can't remember all of Google's search operators, Slop Evader does the work of adding Google's date-range filter to your queries by inserting a tbs=cdr:1,cd_max:MM/DD/YYYY (and optionally cd_min) clause. For example, appending &tbs=cdr:1,cd_max=11/29/2022 to a search URL will restrict results to pages dated before that cutoff. Along with basic Google searches, the extension also includes options to search Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, parenting site Mumsnet, Pinterest, and YouTube, ensuring that even your home DIY ideas aren't being tainted by AI-generated chaff. "Slop Evader rallies against false narratives of progress and assumes that the quality of the internet as an information retrieval tool has been in rapid decline since the public uptake of generative AI," Brain wrote on GitHub. "Everytime your attention is diverted to some piece of media, you must now ask yourself - is this real or is it machine learning? Slop Evader offers some respite." All of the searches - even for specific sites - are returned through Google, as Brain noted that most native search options on popular websites lack the ability to filter by date, so the prioritization of that content is still up to Google's AI algorithms to decide, naturally. It's also worth noting that, while the modern ChatGPT model and the explosion of AI models that followed all began after November 30, 2022, there was still plenty of AI garbage to be found on the internet before that date - it was just way more obvious in the early days than it is now. In other words, this extension will eliminate the bulk of the AI slop that's increasingly tricky to suss out from your search results, but it won't get rid of absolutely everything. Those pre-December 2022 search results aren't getting any fresher, either. For that matter, Brain doesn't think a simple AI-blocking browser extension is the solution to the truth-shattering AI predicament we find ourselves in, either. "We need collective action and pushback that goes beyond individual tools to avoid machine learning," she noted on GitHub. "I hope this project inspires more work and thinking on tools that support a politics of refusal." With the simple JavaScript and HTML code available on GitHub, anyone who wants to tweak the extension to add their own site filters can do so, or just wait for Brain to catch up. "[I'm] interested in adding additional sites if people want to request this," Brain told The Register in an email. "Am def still working on the project." ®