PopSci: “…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…”