A new extension lets you relive the internet before ChatGPT

Try as you might, you can’t undo the last three years of AI hype, but you can make your browser behave as if none of it ever happened.

Imagine a normal search spiral on the Internet today. You type in a question and get a wall of answers that all sound like the same overachieving intern: energetic, polite, a little too eager to summarize “everything you need to know.” Now imagine flipping a switch and watching it all fall to the ground. The present disappears. Post old blog posts with bad fonts, poorer grammar, and strong opinions. Forum threads run on pages and pages. In 2018, someone is still mad about the exact printer error you just saw.

This switch is called Slop Evader. This is a Chrome and Firefox extension created by artist and engineer Tega Brain that tells Google to ignore anything released after November 30, 2022, the day ChatGPT became public. Now you can search as usual, and your results will quietly fade into the pre-bot era, when answers came from bloggers, forum mods, and Very Serious Reddit threads, not from a language model that had learned to write “shed light” 175 billion different ways.

The “No, thanks” button, presented on the Brain site as a “browser extension to prevent AI errors”, is intended to “[push] against false narratives of progress” and borrows from the so-called dead internet theory – the worry that the modern web is more of a colony of robots than a public space. Slop Evader builds on the date filters of the Google Search API, discreetly adding a break to your URL so that everything that appears predates the generative AI gold rush. It also offers one-click filters for sites such as Reddit, Quora, Pinterest and YouTube, you giving a pre-GPT view of where people used to go, ask questions and exchange fixes.

What you get instead is a kind of frozen snapshot of the human-written web. You see more missing commas and fewer detailed pep talks. You land on sites that never learned the phrase “thought leadership.” You spend hours scrolling through a blog with crazy posts full of broken embedded images. The headlines are messy. The jokes are weird. You can hear unique voices in the language again. Reddit posts read like real people typing at midnight, not robots trying very hard to appear helpful. The Internet is perhaps less like a product catalog and more like opening a junk drawer that contains the answer anyway.

In today’s Internet, entire sections of the web now appear to have been written by a robotic hand. Slop Evader is for people who prefer Google like it’s 2020, even if that means no new explainers, no breaking news, and certainly no articles about Slop Evader itself.

And if you use Slop Evader properly, you will never see this story.