A new extension lets you relive the internet before ChatGPT – qz.com
Image via Tega Brain
Try as you might, you can’t rewind the last three years of AI hype — but you can make your browser behave like none of it ever happened.
Picture a normal search spiral on today’s internet. You type in a question and get a wall of answers that all sound like the same overachieving intern: peppy, polished, a little too eager to summarize “everything you need to know.” Now, imagine flipping a switch and watching all of that fall through the floor. The present vanishes. Up pop old blog posts with bad fonts, worse grammar, and strong opinions. Forum threads run for pages and pages. Somebody in 2018 is still furious about the exact printer error you just saw.
That switch is called Slop Evader. It's a Chrome and Firefox extension built by artist and engineer Tega Brain that tells Google to ignore anything published after November 30, 2022, the day ChatGPT went public. Now, you can search as usual, and your results will quietly time-shift to the pre-bot era, when answers came from bloggers, forum mods, and Very Serious Reddit threads, not a language model that learned to write “shed light on” in 175 billion different ways.
The “No, thanks” button, pitched on Brain’s site as a “browser extension for avoiding AI slop,” is intended to “[push] back against false narratives of progress” and borrows from the so-called dead internet theory — the worry that the modern web is more bot colony than public square. Slop Evader leans on the Google Search API’s date filters, quietly appending a cutoff to your URL so everything that surfaces predates the generative-AI gold rush. It also offers one-click filters for sites such as Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, and YouTube, giving you a pre-GPT view into the places where people used to actually ask questions and swap fixes.
What you get instead is a kind of frozen snapshot of the human-written web. You see more missing commas and fewer bullet-point pep talks. You land on sites that never learned the phrase “thought leadership.” You spend hours scrolling on a blog with rant-y posts full of broken image embeds. Headlines are messy. Jokes are weird. You can hear unique voices in the language again. Reddit posts read like actual people typing at midnight, not bots trying very hard to sound helpful. The internet might feel less like a product catalog and more like opening a junk drawer that somehow contains the answer anyway.
In today’s internet, whole corners of the web now read like they were ghostwritten by a robotic hand. Slop Evader is for people who would rather Google like it’s 2020, even if that means no fresh explainers, no breaking news, and definitely no articles about Slop Evader itself.
And if you’re running Slop Evader the way it’s meant to be used, you’ll never even see this story.
