Slop Evader is a browser add-on that searches the web for content posted prior to the first public release of ChatGPT, November 30th, 2022. Slop Evader rallies against false narratives of progress and assumes that the quality of the internet as an information retreival tool has been in rapid decline since the public uptake of generative AI (see dead internet theory). As media like images, video and text become untethered from any kind of reality, they become a space of pure culture, potentially generated from unknown datasets and contexts. The effect of this is that the cognitive load of searching, encountering and assessing the character of media has increased substantially. Everytime your attention is diverted to some piece of media, you must now ask yourself – is this real or is it machine learning? Is this old of new? Where has this come from? Slop Evader offers some respite. If you want to browse the web before the age of generated media, this tool is for you.
If you search using the Google or DuckDuckGo options, the extension simply restricts the search to the date range prior to November 30, 2022 on those respective platforms. It is not using its own search algorithm.
I have been surprised to find that the native search options on other web platforms (Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Mumsnet, Pinterest and YouTube) cannot be strictly filtered based on date. For this reason, Slop Evader uses Google's search to query for posts on the platform but filtered by date.
Google is one of the few search tools that offers strict date filtering. Even DuckDuckGo doesn't support site-specific searches combined with date filters the same way Google does.
No browser add-on will save us. We need collective action and pushback that goes beyond individual tools to avoid maching learning. But I hope this project inspires more work and thinking on tools that support a politics of refusal. We shouldn't be satisfied with a status quo where out-of-touch billionaires get to shape the values, priorities and technologies we build as societies.
It's very easy to do these searches without this extensions, this tool is just a convenience.