open source?
Hi everyone!
I've been getting sick of having AI-generated content recommended to me on YouTube, only to realize a couple minutes in that it's AI slop.
Turns out, a lot of others feel the same way, and it's not just YouTube.
Digital art, books, and articles are becoming more and more robotic, and it doesn't seem like people's ability to sus these out has caught up yet.
That's why I designed SlopWatch.
Through this browser extension, you can express whether you feel a webpage contains AI-generated content, along with tags to specify which specific aspects.
SlopWatch then aggregates everyone's scores into a Slop Rating which others can see. You can see how it works in more detail on the listing page.
Development:
This was my first time developing a browser extension.
I made the frontend in React + Vite, and the backend (if you can call it that) using Supabase.
There's no actual REST API on the backend. Rather, it uses supabase-js to make DB queries directly with security measures on the tables and rows to prevent tampering.
This was quite different from my usual frontend experience, and I had some frustrations building it (especially authentication), but I'm pretty proud of what I've made.
Feedback:
The thing I've been struggling with is getting traction.
SlopWatch has been out for about 6 months, but not many people are biting, even though anti-ai sentiment is widespread.
I made sure to make the suggestions and support functions available on the web store to pre-empt one-star reviews that are just bug reports.
Regardless, I wanted to show off what I've made, and hopefully more people can benefit from an AI-detecting community-based assistant.
Thanks for reading!
open source?
Can’t imagine why people don’t want to join your witch hunt. They always work out well.
It works pretty well with sponsoblock
The extension requires authentication through Google and sends a request with the page URL every time I visit any site. It’s not toggleable and there’s no way to set a filter in extension settings.
Request part makes sense since the data is crowd sourced (how else is it gonna show if the content is flagged or not without knowing what URL you're visiting) But google auth doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe to identify submitters to prevent spamming or false flagging?
I think the problem is that reporting something as AI is not as valuable and just being able to not have to see it in the first place. Even if your app says 'This {web element} is likely slop' (similar to like google maps' report police feature), it still doesn't solve the amount of slop people are exposed to. Which is the greater problem that needs solving. Unlikely to be solved by any third party apps. I suppose if you made a companion feature that blocks 'potential slop' content over a certain empiracle threshold then maybe that would help. Even then, it requires people to install something (your app) instead of just using the platform natively. Most people are seeing slop on social media platforms, of which most people use their mobile phones for that. So your app is basically useless for the vast majority of the user base even if it had a feature like that. So I just think the idea is dead in the water, unfortunately.
He’s probably just selling the data to people training AI anyway
I like the idea but I'm not sure there will be much use for this in the near future. Here in the EU for example, the new AI Act takes effect tomorrow (August 2), requiring all AI content to be clearly labelled. I don't know about the US and other regions, maybe they will follow.
It's a cool idea and I wish you luck with traction. I don't know if I would use it though-- once I see that something is slop I'm likely to just click away and seeing what other people think may or may not be helpful. As someone else mentioned, the privacy implications are real though. I would make an effort to explain what you collect and how it's anonimized (or not)
Oh the irony of an AI generated AI detector lol
Chrome
slop
A witch might go left unburned.
A vibe-coded AI finder that phones home. What's not to love?