Imagining a future where smart glasses allow ‘AI slop’ to be avoided

By the mid-2020s, the world was inundated with “AI waste.” Be it images, videos, music, emails, advertisements, speeches or TV shows, many people have interacted with stupid content generated by artificial intelligence. Sometimes the experience was fun and relatively harmless, but often it was exhausting and mind-blowing. In the worst case it could be dangerously misleading. Even engagements with other people became suspicious – who knew whether the person on the phone was real or not? Many people found this disgusting and offensive and wanted to avoid this slop.

There was no “Butlerian jihad” – the fictional overthrow of all thinking machines in the world. Dune books named after Samuel Butler's prophetic 1863 letter on the evolution of machines, “Darwin of the Machines.” In fact, ironically, the solution came through the clever use of AI.

Technology companies have developed a number of smart glasses which provided augmented reality (AR) displays with built-in cameras, microphones and headphones. In 2028, Reclaim Reality Foundation engineers used this technology in smart glasses and used special AI to detect and then remove anything that was created by the AI. Wearing dumb glasses acted as a kind of negative ARcreating a completely non-augmented reality.

Walking around the city wearing these “dumb glasses,” which have become known as X-ray glasses because they can see right through everything, was akin to paying for a TV show or ad-free podcast. The glasses removed AI-generated banners and posters and seamlessly replaced them with natural backgrounds. Any speech or song you heard, you could be sure that it was created using a traditional analog process. People used X-rays to relax, calm down, and clear out the waves of AI that they would otherwise have to contend with. Some owners celebrated their status with T-shirts and pins with slogans such as “AI Vegan,” “Real or Nothing,” and “Slop Free Zone.”

As technology improved in the 2030s, it became possible to wear electronic contact lenses and miniature ear implants that perform the same function.

In the online world, things were different. There it was much more difficult to escape the clutches of AI and constant algorithmic profiling.

One method was to use a workaround to access search engines without running the AI ​​summary. In the 2020s, one of these options was startpage.com. Other hacks included adding expletives to your search bar, which disables AI-generated summaries. But the workarounds have not helped avoid AI profiling and targeting when using social media. Avoiding this was easier said than done when social media, online navigation tools and the online world itself were under the complete control of the tech giants. And few people wanted to give up everything that the Internet revolution gave us. They still wanted to explore the digital world and rich online experiences.

The answer was the emergence of a third type of network. There was the regular Internet and there was the darknet, accessible only with certain browsers and passwords. Then there was veriveb (from Truthwhich is Latin for “truth”), created from content marked as “AI-free”. In collaboration with Reclaim Reality, artists, musicians and writers developed a non-counterfeit system, similar to the blockchain technology used to verify cryptocurrency transactions, that guaranteed the human origin of any content. Veriweb, also known as the transparent web because one could see where content was coming from, became the home of guaranteed information and journalism. Wikipedia, suffers from content created by artificial intelligence for most of the 2020s, moved to veriweb in 2029. News providers set up outposts there and were soon followed by legacy news and media organizations eager to demonstrate their authenticity, reliability and truthfulness. Moreover, on Veriweb, users are not tracked, profiled or targeted by AI algorithms.

What was achieved when millions and then billions took this step was a return to human connection and increased creativity. Most of them still used AI for personal purposes – for example, in medical diagnoses – but the atrophy of the human brain that began in the 2020s, when more and more action were outsourced to AI, it was verified.

What was lost as people tried to navigate the vastness of cyberspace without the help of algorithms pointing them in useful directions was the sense that your online experience was carefully curated and personalized. What was also lost was the unprecedented amount of intimate data collected by these mega-companies, and the enormous profits made from the targeted use of that data. Few mourned this loss.

Rowan Hooper is New scientistpodcast editor and author How to spend a trillion dollars: 10 global problems we can actually solve. Follow him on Bluesky @rowhoop.bsky.social.