What happened?

Your AI Slop Bores Me is a web game that stands out for its simplicity. It has two tabs: human and LARP as an AI. On one side you enter a request; on the other you submit an answer. The important part is this: there is a real human on both sides of the equation.

Requests can be for text or image, and whoever is roleplaying as the AI gets 150 seconds to respond.

How it works

  • Two tabs: the human side and the AI-roleplay side
  • Request types: text or image
  • Time: the roleplayer gets 150 seconds
  • Credits: requests cost credits; earning them means switching to the AI side
  • Free allowance: one request every two minutes
  • Also: a Discord server and a Hall of Fame

Just like a real large language model, the game works on a sort of token system. Requests cost credits, and the way to earn credits is to jump onto the AI side and answer other people's requests. Users who would rather wait get one free request every two minutes.

Where the fun actually is

Dropping a question or an image request into the chatbox and seeing what comes back is fun; but by The Verge's account the real joy is in pretending to be the chatbot. That is also where the difficulty lies: trying to satisfy near-impossible requests within two and a half minutes using a bare-bones, MS-Paint-like tool.

If a request does not appeal, it can be skipped. The game also has a Discord server and a Hall of Fame, which includes an alarmingly good rendition of Starry Night.

Why it is interesting

What the game shows is cultural rather than technical. The difficulties that appear when a human tries to do a model's job — the distance between request and output, a tight clock, a limited tool and the effort to guess what the other side expects — become visible from an angle the user has probably never considered.

The name itself takes a position: "Your AI slop bores me." The reaction to the abundance of AI-generated content appears here not as a critical essay but as a game.

The limits are a design choice too

The three constraints in the game's setup — the 150-second clock, the crude drawing tool and the credit system — are not arbitrary. Together they bring a real model's invisible constraints down to human scale: limited compute time, limited output quality and a limited usage allowance.

The roleplayer being able to skip a request belongs to the same frame. A real model can refuse a request it receives; the skip button here is the counterpart of that behaviour, and the player's only way out.

What is not settled

No information was shared about the game's user numbers, how long it has been online, or the team behind it. The assessment rests on The Verge writer's own experience; the writer also notes that the ads are overboard and obtrusive.