We are literally bombarded with AI content everywhere we turn: AI songs, AI images, AI stories! All of these appear millions of times everywhere, whether we’re hanging out on Reddit, YouTube, or, above all, Google searches. Australian engineer and artist Tega Brain is also annoyed by this situation until she came up with her own tool to come to terms with AI slop.
A Trip Back in Time
First of all: what is “AI slop”, anyway? The term refers to mass-produced, low-quality AI content that increasingly clogs up the internet and search results like spam without offering you any actual added value.
With a small browser extension (Chrome or Firefox) called Slop Evader, you can come to terms with this unrelenting AI flood. It basically uses a little trick: The extension changes the time to November 30, 2022. What is so significant about that date? It was exactly when ChatGPT was launched worldwide. The extension takes you back to a time when AI content was nowhere near as common as it is today.
It’s So Easy to Hide AI Slop
It is very easy to use. After installation, you have the option of calling up a small menu via the icon in the browser’s toolbar. As you can see in the picture above, you can search not only on Google, but also on DuckDuckGo, Reddit, YouTube, etc.
You then enter your search term in the desired line. The query always ends up in the Google search, but is filtered accordingly. So if I were to search for “dragon” on Pinterest, I would obtain a Google results page with links to dragons on Pinterest, all of which were posted before November 30, 2022.
To briefly categorize it: Yes, you can also search manually on the Google page and hide more recent content. But of course, it’s quicker and less complicated this way. And again, yes, there’s no guarantee that you won’t see any more AI content. After all, AI wasn’t invented with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT is largely responsible for cluttering the internet with AI stuff, making it a perfectly valid date to begin with.
