Play the Chatbot: A Site Where a Living Person Stands In for the Neural Network

The Verge has taken notice of a web toy with a blunt name: Your AI Slop Bores Me. Its charm lies in its utter simplicity. The site has two tabs: “human” and “roleplay as AI.” In the first, you type in a request; in the second, you send back a reply. The whole trick is that a living person sits on both sides of the conversation.

Requests can be submitted as either text or an image. Whoever is playing the role of the neural network at that moment gets 150 seconds to produce something in response. There's no real artificial intelligence involved in the process — just someone else's imagination and a timer.

Tokens, but Human Ones

The service even mimics the familiar economics of large language models. There's a kind of token system at work: requests cost credits, and to earn them you have to switch over to the “AI” side yourself and answer someone else's requests. You can also just wait — one free request is handed out every two minutes.

According to The Verge's author, the funniest part is precisely pretending to be a chatbot. Users keep asking you to draw some obscure anime character who is all but impossible to render in a bare-bones MS Paint–style editor within the allotted two and a half minutes. But that's the whole point: to try to fit within the tight constraints while keeping up the illusion that there really is a machine on the other end. If a request doesn't inspire you at all, you can skip it.

Hall of Fame and Intrusive Ads

The project has its own Discord server and a “Hall of Fame.” In the latter, the author notes, you'll come across an alarmingly good rendition of van Gogh's “The Starry Night” — made, let's recall, by a living person in a primitive editor. The only fly in the ointment is the overly intrusive advertising.

In essence, Your AI Slop Bores Me is an ironic amusement in which people voluntarily take on the role of a generative model and learn firsthand what it's like: to field absurd requests, work in a rush, and still try to produce something meaningful.

Source: The Verge