Show HN: How to Kill the Dead Internet (chromewebstore.google.com)
For writing, it checks known vocab and punctuation tells, as well as subtler tells related to cadence, and assigns it a score subject to an adjustable threshold. If the text fails, users have the option to flag offending text, hide it, or block the page entirely (with the option to see anyway).
For media, it's admittedly fairly weak, as it relies on C2PA metadata which is stripped from all of the social media sites where it would be most helpful. (Anyone else have chronically online boomer parents continually gobbling up slop like it's real information?)
I have a D-slop+ version in the works that should be able to handle the media itself, but it's going to have to make API calls to have real teeth, which means I can't offer it for free. If this extension validates the concept, I'm happy to build it for y'all.
Yes, I vibe-coded it, but an ancillary bonus to the project accrued when it inspired me to cook dinner listening to Metallica's "Fight Fire with Fire," which in turn brought my 5 y/o running into the kitchen with every musical instrument in the house for an impromptu karaoke speed metal session.
It's MIT license open-source, full brief at https://github.com/jared-the-automator/d-slop; This forum is full of people smarter than me, so I'm open to suggestions.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 30.7 ms ] threadThe limit ultimately will be how well the algorithm can keep up with changes in LLM cadence over time. This is usually were project like this come undone, the concept it easy enough to build, it is the up to date data set where the real magic is.
But other than that, very cool to see and interested to see how it goes.
As an aside... have you ever noticed that there is a common way of communicating online. A kind of "average-speak". Lots of us fall into this category. It's all of us influencing how many of us express ourselves online.
I think that the influence of AI will eventually (sooner than expected) influence what words we use, how we express ourselves too. That AI-speak may very well become "average-speak".
> to disincentivize anyone from posting AI writing, and eventually images and video as well, on the internet.
If you need people to take you seriously and there is a chance that they will judge you for your gen-AI content because they know it's not your own work, would you still post it?
I would point here to another issue - I guess most of the newly created public texts over the internet are at least passed through AI, just to polish and simplify it. So AI-style itself might be not that bad, if there is some interesting and newly invented idea behind. So the bigger problem, from my point of view, is that it's hard to distinguish: if certain AI-generated text has a good idea behind, or it is just a AI-garbage out of top-10 search result from google to certain topic.
That brings me an idea that it could be useful to have a metric like "newness" or "novelty" in addition to marking text as AI-generated. But seems like it is totally another direction :)
To the second point, that's the idea behind the adjustable threshold. It is indeed hard to distinguish; the extension will miss some gen-AI writing and return false-positives on some human writing. The user gets to decide which side to err toward.
It will never be infallible because the writing won't have C2PA metadata attached to it the way media does. It's just a tool that is a whole lot better than nothing for people who don't want to waste their time reading something written by a robot, or hate the inhuman homogeneity of "AI style." Don't you ever find yourself thinking "nobody talks like this?"