In the middle of a Monday workday, I found myself writing fan fiction for a stranger on the internet who wanted to read a scenario of themselves with a pit of quicksand.
I was logged on to “Your AI slop bores me,” a new gamified website designed by programmer Mihir Maroju. The site is a parody of popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Except instead of asking an AI your most random, silly, out-of-left-field questions, “Your AI slop bores me” directs your requests to an actual random person on the internet.
“In a world looming with the threat of ai stealing your job, save humanity by stealing ai’s job,” the site’s description reads.
According to Maroju, inspiration for the site came from “a frustration for AI art and its proliferation, making artists’ lives worse and also just filling the internet with low-effort generic slop.”
It was also an attempt to “bring back early-internet vibes,” he tells Fast Company.
So far, it’s working. In just a week, the site has garnered about 50 million views, and is currently sitting at 16,000 concurrent users.
According to Maroju, the past several days have been spent upgrading the site’s servers—“to the point that the data center had no more CPU cores to give us.”
“Your AI slop bores me” might be running on servers, but it specializes in the flavor of ridiculousness that only humans can recreate.
How this human-powered chatbot game works
“Your AI slop bores me” is essentially a bartering system for human creativity, packaged in a ChatGPT format.
When you first log on to the site, you have two free credits to ask another user to either write or draw something. Once you run out of these credits, you can earn new ones by “larping as AI,” or answering questions and making drawings that other users asked for within a given time limit.
Each AI-larping (live action role-playing) session earns you two credits to put toward finding out if, say, the moon landing was faked, or asking for an image of a llama wearing a hat.
For those who inevitably try to use this interface for evil, Maroju says his team has put several guardrails up.
“We knew this would be a problem once the site scaled, and we now have a mix of automated and manual moderators making sure no one’s ruining the fun for everyone else,” he says. “We also have a rating system and fingerprinting to make sure we serve and reward high-quality posts and try to keep spam low.”
During my time on the site, I was asked a question about a fandom that I didn’t recognize; commissioned a drawing of a hot dog with legs, as well as an image of a flying spoon; and made a picture of my cat for someone else.
The site frequently had trouble loading and glitched when I attempted to enter a prompt, leaving several of my pressing questions unanswered. (Others on Reddit have noted similar issues.)
In spite of its flaws, something about having fun with other people on the internet in this very tongue-in-cheek application felt distinctly wholesome and, as Maroju intended, reminiscent of the “old internet.”
The site is incontrovertible proof of one important truth: Human slop beats AI slop every time.
