Show HN: How to Kill the Dead Internet

[bigger_fish]

Ok, so maybe "how to revive the internet" would be more accurate, but if you're reading this, I got your attention, right? Here's why I want you to read on: I built a free extension, D-slop, to disincentivize anyone from posting AI writing, and eventually images and video as well, on the internet.

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.

[gin_dev]

Interesting approach. But I guess most of the people who uses AI now, have already a feeling, if some text is prepared by AI or not :)

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 :)

[bigger_fish]

To your first point, yes, I agree. I would continue the thought that many of them are irritated with it and would rather not see it at all.

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?"

[O1111OOO]

This is not intended as an insult or judgement. Is this gatekeeper software? That we might be seeing the development of a new type of category. It's kinda' off-putting but I understand the need for it.

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".

[bigger_fish]

I suppose that depends on what you mean by gatekeeper. Is it intended to keep the robots out? Yes, in that sense it belongs to the Cloudflare camp of bot detection software, not really a new thing.

AI-speak won't become average-speak if I have anything to do with it. I want people to continue using their own brains to construct sentences rather than farming them out to machines.

[O1111OOO]

> I suppose that depends on what you mean by gatekeeper.

Something that is intended to evaluate every single post and if a regular human submits something that is even remotely suspiciously AI (even if "they used their own brains" to construct it), it would flag that user.

Eventually if that user gets flagged enough by these "well-meaning", data-sharing, gatekeeping systems, they get booted off all the gatekeeping sites that are now operating as one.

Having been denied access to human sites, those poor souls would have no choice but to join the AI alliance of sites and submit their postings there. With time, they might earn honorary AI status and a seat in the New World Order.

> using their own brains to construct sentences rather than farming them out to machines.

But that's the point. They are "using their own brains" but because of the prevalence of AI in society and the influence it would have on so many others, much of the language and cadence would trickle down to even the last remaining rebel forces.

Eventually, the gatekeeping systems would turn on the remaining champions of free thought - whose words sound even more AI than AI itself, leaving only the automated gatekeeping systems to continue to operate autonomously, denying access to all.

You my friend are the turning point in earth's future. Please, don't do this.

I'm just having some fun :-)

[bigger_fish]

Wow, you're taking in an Orwellian direction. The reason my extension doesn't qualify as a gatekeeper under your definition is that its use is distributed, not centralized. Each individual user gets to set the tolerance threshold according to their use case. It has no power to "act autonomously."

It also can't be used as a gatekeeper in that sense precisely because of its inherent fallibility. It will definitely miss some gen-AI writing and return false positives on real human writing. It's only supposed to be "much better than nothing" for people who reject the inhuman homogeneity of AI-writing and want to see less of it on their screen.

I'm not sure I follow your trickle-down argument, but in any case, the system is dynamic. It checks daily for new models and human-authored articles on their specific ticks, and cross-checks a corpus of known human-authored works. It will track both AI and human writing over time and adjust accordingly.

[O1111OOO]

Sorry, I didn't mean anything by my response. I started to write and after a couple of words, the goofy side of me just took over. When I reread it, it sounded funny, in a light-hearted way, and so I decided to leave it.

On a busy thread, that kind of response would likely be downvoted into oblivion (as it should be). Thank you for your serious response to the topic.

[HerbManic]

I like that it doesn't block the content but merely highlights it. That is a smart move.

The 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.

[bigger_fish]

Thanks! It's actually dynamic. The backend contains a sequence that checks daily for new model updates and human-published documents regarding AI writing tells, then adjusts scoring accordingly.

That scoring methodology is the only part of the extension that's not open source; it's hidden behind a Cloudflare worker to prevent reverse engineering.

[Gooblebrai]

I might not be understanding the tool, but how are you achieving this purpose?

> to disincentivize anyone from posting AI writing, and eventually images and video as well, on the internet.

[bigger_fish]

Good question! The idea is that if the tools like this gain sufficient adoption, people will stop seeing gen-AI content. Why post if no views?

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?