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The integration of artificial intelligence into digital content is becoming impossible to ignore. It’s littering our social media feeds with slop and fundamentally changing the landscape of digital platforms.

For those of us who aren’t on the AI bandwagon, distinguishing between human-created content and AI-generated slop online can be exhausting. Protesting appears virtually impossible. There’s no way to picket against the prompting of AI-generated cat videos or a social media caption with way too many em-dashes.

But there are ways to resist; movements with a focus on human creation are making themselves known.

“Your AI slop bores me” is a viral multiplayer web game created in March that has started to gain significant traction. It satirizes popular large language models like ChatGPT. In the game, you can either play as a human asking questions or live-action roleplay as an AI answering them. If you’re interested in playing, be ready to take AI’s job. You have to earn points to take on the role of a human asking multiple questions.

I played for the first time on March 11. I decided to LARP as the AI first to gather points. Playing this way certainly tests your patience, since you have to wait for a prompt. I sat in a queue of about 1,700 other players also waiting. Around three minutes later, I was rewarded with a human asking a question — and then I only had 60 seconds to respond.

I never imagined that taking AI’s job would be so fun. I played for hours.

When asking questions, don’t expect anything a large language model would normally spit out in response. As the countdown clock ticks, you have to think quickly or skip the prompt for a different one. With graduation approaching and my future career at the top of mind, I decided to ask how to land a corporate job.

“dont fall victim to capitalist propaganda and stay unemployed,” the “AI” responded.

The bluntness caught me off guard, and that’s exactly what makes the game feel radical. It directly contrasts the people-pleasing nature of most LLMs today. It’s not a machine looking to find you the answer you want. It’s better: another human putting in effort to come up with something thought-provoking or creative.

The website’s creator, Mihir Maroju, also known as mikidoodle, has created a gameplay-based protest. By replacing an “all-knowing” LLM with an anonymous human, the game highlights the fundamental differences between them. Humans make mistakes; they aren’t perfect. They misspell words or scribble a drawing with a lopsided face.

Katie Crews | Digital Design Editor

AI certainly makes mistakes too, but they aren’t the small, quirky mistakes that signal human work. Instead, we deal with hallucinations and biases that spread misinformation, or gaps in visuals that signal prompt generation is behind video and photo creation.

There’s tangible whimsy from the human experience. We have to put in time and effort to create; we can’t immediately generate. Some enjoy AI for its speed, but there’s no need for praise when all it seems to create is slop.

Finding content created without AI is refreshing, and engaging with it is an act of resistance.

@sorrycarlee is making multimedia animation, choosing to “do it the hard way” instead of using AI. She documents cutting out her own images and magazines to create with.

@helloimsprout creates stop motion animations of a clay potato. In one video, the creator addresses comments from people who hope the content isn’t AI-generated, showing the tedious process of creating each shot to be edited together later.

@jamescookartwork is drawing with a typewriter. I definitely couldn’t do that, and neither could AI.

Marketing teams are keeping AI out of their creative processes as well. Luxury fashion houses, like Hermès, are using human-made illustrations on their website and social media. Publications are leaning this way as well. Outside Berlin is an independent fashion magazine that routinely posts their policy of keeping AI out of their creation process. Their pages depict real models and art, not generated ones.

There’s a clear difference between content made with AI and content made without. Human work, whether it’s an image, video, painting or article, takes time. You struggle to find what works; pivot when it’s not quite right. That process is something that AI can never do, and why we will continue to search for human creations in a sea of slop.

Bella Tabak is a senior majoring in magazine journalism. She can be reached at batabak@syr.edu.

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