Surf the web like it’s 2022 with Slop Evader

It’s hard to believe that just a few short years ago a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti generated by ModelScope, a text-to-video AI model, was the peak of AI slop.

Fast-forward to today and our trust for CCTV footage of cute animals has been eroded, slop is showing up across marketing and music playlists, and Sora 2 deepfakes are fooling both grandparents and politicians nationwide. 

A number of artist projects are fighting back against the deluge of slop polluting the shared waters of the internet (or at least poking fun at those who willingly consume it). 

Steve Nasopoulos and Peter Henningsen, both freelance copywriters, recently created the Slop Trough in their spare time. It’s a digital feeding trough that serves up endless slop, so long as you turn on your webcam and get down on all fours like a good little piggy.

“Are you a little piggy who needs your slop?” the homepage asks. Click yes and it tells you to “get on the ground on all fours oink oink.”

“We just wanted to capture the degrading feeling of having someone put this horrible content in front of us and actually expect us to consume it. It feels, how shall we say, a little dehumanizing?” the creators told Fast Company. “The internet was once a magical place, because it was full of weirdos making bizarre websites and stupid art projects. Slop and AI content are diametrically opposed to that because it’s mass-produced garbage made by robots.” 

Other online art projects imagine an internet untouched by generative AI. 404 media recently reported on Slop Evader, a browser tool created by artist and researcher Tega Brain that filters web searches to include only results from before November 30, 2022—the day ChatGPT was released to (or, rather, unleashed on) the public.

The term AI slop itself emerged around 2023, when platforms like ChatGPT and DALL-E became publicly available and more widely adopted, according to Google Trends. Yet concerns about AI among U.S. adults have grown exponentially since 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, so much so that slurs for robots now exist. 

But for every new AI slop video created, there will always be those resisting it with human-made projects. As Nasopoulos and Henningsen put it: “We think humans making stuff and putting it on the internet is what the internet was designed for, so the more of that the better.”

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