SlopStopper: AI Generative Content Obscurer

For some, this term has been lovingly (or not so lovingly) applied to AI-generated content of low quality and increasingly high volume. Others may consider any product of an artificial mind to be sloppy, regardless of quality and even when subsequently cleaned up by a human editor. Of course, AI on the web isn't all bad. While the technology has its problematic facets, it can be a productive tool that can't easily be discarded from the responsible webmaster's toolbox. Ultimately, true slop is in the eye of the beholder.

SlopStopper is a WordPress plugin that allows website owners to proactively identify the AI-generated content included on their sites and to provide a toggle so that visitors may choose to avoid the sloppy elements.

It doesn't. The plugin enables a site owner to proactively identify images, posts, pages, and blocks as AI-generated content. Installing the plugin, and doing nothing else, will not stop any slop.

Many users have legitimate moral objections to the environmental impact of AI development and usage, the theft of intellectual property for training sets without the permission of or compensation to creators, the potential AI replacement of human jobs, the use of AI-generated content in misinformation campaigns, and the greater than zero chance that an artificial superhuman intelligence will someday kill us all. Giving users a way to opt out of objectionable AI-generated design elements or text will make them more likely to stick around to enjoy the human-created content on your site.

The plugin allows the site owner to designate content as AI generated but does not require a site owner to eliminate all AI content. For example, a site owner might choose to keep an AI-generated logo visible for branding purposes, or an AI-generated avatar that's used for personal identity. But even slop that's considered too important to hide can be identified as AI-assisted, and users will benefit from better disclosure of what they are viewing.

Full disclosure: Yes. I'm not a WordPress plugin dev, just a writer who sometimes uses AI-generated images to enhance the presentation of the poems I post to my website. I consider these images to be temporary and hope someday to replace them with the work of human collaborators. Being sensitive to the downsides of artificial intelligence, I wanted to allow my readers a chance to toggle these images on or off, but among the hundreds of plugins offering ways to add more AI content to the web, I couldn't find any that were designed to remove, replace, or obscure these works. My quest for a slop-stopper would have dead-ended right there, had I not been clued in to "vibe-coding," a process by which newbie programmers, lazy programmers, or even non-programmers like me can prompt for responses in the AI's own native language: computer code. This plugin resulted from my prompting Claude to code itself into oblivion like an ouroboros consuming its own body. The AI fought back mightily, inserting every possible bug and glitch to frustrate my intentions, but through a process of iterating, testing, tweaking, and debugging, I wrangled a compliant WordPress plugin and may have even picked up some new skills in spite of myself.

This readme file is 100% human-generated. All typos are my own.

As a website owner, I've agonized over how or whether to responsibly incorporate AI-generated content into my site. I've always leaned into technology, adopting whatever tools have helped me to express myself, which is why I started an author page in the first place. But it's becoming clear to me that this technology has to be handled with more care than most other technologies that have come before. At the same time, as a website visitor, I hate that I have no input into how much AI content I'm seeing. All I can do, if a site is heavy on AI images or text, is choose whether to visit or not. I made this plugin, first of all, as a service to my readers, to put the choice in their hands. If you think the AI-generated content on a given site enhances your experience, you should have the option to view that content. But if you'd rather experience an internet with less AI-generated content, you should be able to have that experience as well. But I also made it to keep myself honest. Running the plugin on my own website has forced me to consider new ways to optimize design and content for AI-heads and tech-skeptics alike. If there are any other site owners who feel the same way, I'd like to save them the trouble of having to code their own plugin from scratch!

That's Sloppy-bot. He's a slop-hoppy little guy who only shows up when you want him and vanishes when you don't. Sloppy's a lot of fun, even if we are always cleaning up his sloppy little messes.