Watching people outsource their critical thinking, emotions, and sanity to glitchy \u201cAI\u201d chatbots has been one of the most uniquely terrifying aspects of being a human being in recent years.\u00a0While wealthy tech evangelists like Sam Altman continue to make wild proclamations about how large language models (LLMs) are destined to do our jobs and raise our children, critics have compared Silicon Valley\u2019s attempts to force dependence on chatbots to a mass-enfeebling event\u2014an attempt to convince people that they are actually better off having machines think, act, and create for them.Now, there\u2019s a new way to discourage friends, family, and even complete strangers from turning to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT: by using a tool called \u201cSlow LLM\u201d to make them really, reaaaaalllyyy slowwwww. Or at least, making them look that way.\u201cAre you concerned that you or your loved ones might be participating in a massive de-skilling event? Experiencing LLM-induced psychosis? Outsourcing cognitive and emotional functions to autocomplete? Install SLOW LLM on your computer, or the computer of a loved one, today!\u201d reads a description on the tool\u2019s website.Created by artist Sam Lavigne, Slow LLM causes anyone accessing AI chatbots on a computer or network to encounter mysterious, painfully slow response times. It works by manipulating a quirk in the Javascript language to rewrite the \u201cFetch\u201d function that returns data to the browser. When a user visits a chatbot domain and enters a query, the modified Fetch function stretches the response over an excruciatingly long period of time. This results in the user perceiving the LLM to be running slowly, when in reality it\u2019s simply being arbitrarily metered by Lavigne\u2019s code.Lavigne says that the idea for the project came after seeing how deeply some of his students and acquaintances had come to rely on generative tools to do basic tasks.\u201cSo many people are starting to use these tools to outsource their cognitive and emotional functions, and in the process of doing this they\u2019re forgetting all these basic things that they\u2019ve learned how to do,\u201d Lavigne told 404 Media. \u201cI think that the more people rely on LLMs, the more extreme this de-skilling event will become.\u201d\tSlow LLM can be installed as a Chrome browser extension, but it can also be deployed network-wide via an \u201cEnterprise Edition,\u201d a DNS service which causes everyone on a home, school, or corporate network to experience slow chatbot responses. This is done by simply changing the DNS server on your router to Lavigne\u2019s custom domain\u2014though he warns that using a random person\u2019s DNS is generally not a great idea cybersecurity-wise, and recommends the safer option of hosting your own DNS server to deploy the Slow LLM code, which he has released for free on Github. The browser extension currently only affects Claude and ChatGPT, while the DNS version also slows down Grok and Google Gemini.\u201cThe idea was that these things are removing friction, so let\u2019s add some friction back in,\u201d said Lavigne, using the engineering term frequently used by tech bros to describe inefficiencies in a system. He argues that LLM chatbots have taken this idea of \u201cfriction\u201d to an extreme, presenting any unpleasantness or difficulty we encounter as something that should be outsourced to Silicon Valley\u2019s thinking machines\u2014even if overcoming that difficulty is part of what makes human creativity meaningful and worthwhile. \u201cAnything that removes the friction of something that\u2019s difficult, it makes you not learn, and it removes the learning you\u2019ve already achieved.\u201dIn theory, one could activate Slow LLM without anyone noticing; most people would likely assume that chatbot providers like Google and OpenAI are having technical issues, which does happen without outside interference from time to time. Lavigne says that so far, he hasn\u2019t heard from anyone that has successfully deployed Slow LLM on a work or school network. But he certainly isn\u2019t discouraging people from trying.\u201cI have not yet tested it on any unwitting subjects, but I\u2019m thinking about it,\u201d Lavigne said in a mischievous tone, adding that it would be an interesting experiment to see how people react when presented with artificially-slow chatbots. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ll just rage-quit LLMs.\u201dSlow LLM is the latest addition to a series of impish tech provocations that Lavigne has become known for. During the height of the pandemic Zoompocalypse in 2021, he released \u201cZoom Escaper,\u201d a tool that floods your Zoom audio stream with annoying echoes, distortions, and interruptions until your presence becomes unbearable to others. In 2018, he infamously scraped public LinkedIn profiles to build a massive database of ICE agents, which was subsequently removed from platforms like Github and Medium. Lavigne\u2019s frequent collaborator Tega Brain has also released browser tools like \u201cSlop Evader,\u201d which filters out generative AI slop by removing all search results from after November 2022, when ChatGPT was first released to the public.\u201cI\u2019ve been doing these little experiments in digital sabotage where I\u2019m trying to make these tools that mildly interrupt computational systems,\u201d said Lavigne. \u201cOne of the things I\u2019ve been thinking about is how if the means of production is truly in our hands, and it\u2019s also the way we\u2019re communicating with other people and managing our social life, then what does it mean to interrupt productivity?\u201dLavigne is not an absolutist, however. Without prompting, he admitted that he used Claude to help write some of the code for Slow LLM\u2014until, of course, Slow LLM started working and forced him to complete the project on his own. Instead, Lavigne says he\u2019s trying to make people question the habits they are forming by regularly using chatbots, tools which tempt us to essentially entrust all our knowledge, decision-making, and emotional well-being to massive companies run by tech billionaires like Altman and Elon Musk.\u201cMy hope is to get people to think a little bit more about their usage of these tools,\u201d said Lavigne. \u201cBut the broader thing I want people to think about [\u2026] is ways of interrupting these flows of data, these flows of power, and putting friction into these computational systems that are mediating so many parts of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"