Recently, I found myself ruminating on the general lack of AI slop over on Newgrounds (a site I use rather heavily, and have been since I joined in 2023). The only major case I've seen in recent memory was an influx of vibe-coded shovelware I saw last month.

If the title didn't tip you off, I personally believe it to be due to Newgrounds being naturally resistant to contamination with AI slop. Here's a few reasons why I think that is:

An Explicit Stance

First off, I'll get the obvious reason out the way.

Newgrounds has explicitly banned AI slop from being uploaded since September 2022,very early into the bubble. Whilst the guidelines carve out some minor exceptions for using AI to assist human work, simply generating a piece of slop and hitting “Upload” is off the table.

The only real development since then was a site update in early March 2024, which added the option to flag a submission as AI slop.

Both of these moves made the site’s stance loud and clear: AI slop of all stripes is not welcome on NG.

Beyond giving the mods explicit permission to delete slop on sight, the move likely did plenty to deter AI bros from setting up shop - if they weren't gonna get some easy clout from spewing their slop on there, why bother?

DeviantArt provides an obvious point of contrast here - far from take any concrete stance against AI slop, the site actively welcomed it, launching a slop generator of their own in November 2022 and doing nothing to rein in slop as it flooded the site.

Slop-proof Monetization

A second, and arguably less important factor, is Newgrounds’ general approach to monetisation - both in making money and paying it out.

In terms of making money, Newgrounds has pushed heavily towards running ad-free since the start of the decade - as of this writing, Newgrounds relies near-exclusively on Supporter (a subscription service which started in 2012, for context) for revenue. (Right now, adverts run exclusively on A-rated submissions (i.e. porn), which require an account to view.)

At the same time, the site wound down its previous rev-share system (which directly ran on ad revenue), leaving just the monthly cash prizes for payouts.

The overall effect of this change has been to render NG outright inhospitable to content farms (AI-based or otherwise) - being reliant on ad revenue to turn a profit off their low quality Content™, the near-total lack thereof renders running one on there impractical.

(Arguably, this reason isn't a particularly important one - being a niche animation site dwarfed by the likes of YouTube and Instagram, NG likely fell well under the radars of content farms even before its ad-free push.)

DeviantArt, once again, provides an easy point of contrast - as the site itself has proudly paraded, the site's monetisation features have enabled AI bros to make a quick buck off of flooding it with slop.

Judgment/Scouting

Wrapping this up with something that doesn't have a parallel in dA, I'm gonna look at the judgment and scouting systems used on the site. Though originally intended to maintain a minimum level of quality, these systems have helped prevent AI slop from gaining a foothold as well.

Judgment

For the main Portal (which covers animations and games), a simple voting process called judgment is used - users vote from 0 to 5 on uploaded works, with low-scoring submissions being automatically deleted (referred to as being ‘blammed’).

Whilst rather simple, the process has proven effective in keeping low-effort garbage off of Newgrounds - and with “low-effort garbage” being a perfect description of AI slop, the judgment process has enabled users to get rid of AI slop without moderator intervention, reducing the mods’ workload in the process.

Scouting

For the Audio Portal and the Art Portal, a vetting system (referred to as “scouting”) is used instead.

By default, work by unscouted artists appears in the "Undiscovered Artists" section of the Art/Audio Portals, hidden away from public view unless someone actively opts-in to view it or they find it from checking the user’s account.

If an already-scouted user or a moderator sees an unscouted user, they have the option to scout them, essentially vouching that their work follows site guidelines and is of sufficiently high quality. The effects of this are twofold:

• First, the user’s work is placed into the “Approved Artists” section of the appropriate Portal, granting a large boost to its visibility.
• Second, the user is granted the ability to scout other users, vouching for their work in turn.

Said ability is something users are required to exercise with caution - if the scouted user is later caught breaking site guidelines (or if their work is deemed too poor-quality), they can be de-scouted by an Art/Audio Moderator, and those who scouted them can be stripped of their ability to scout other users.

This system creates an easy method of establishing trust among the userbase (arguably equivalent to a PGP-style web of trust) - simply by knowing someone's been scouted, you can be confident they're posting human-made work, and scouted users can in turn extend that trust by scouting other users.

Additionally, Art/Audio Moderators are equipped to handle any breaches in said trust, whether by de-scouting users for posting slop, or removing scouting abilities from users who can't be trusted with them, enabling trust to be quickly restored.

As a secondary benefit, any slop which does get submitted is effectively hidden from view by default, making it easy for human-made work to drown out the slop, rather than the other way around.

Conclusion

The large-scale proliferation of generative AI has been a disaster for the Internet at large, flooding practically every corner of it with AI slop of all stripes.

Given all that, its kinda miraculous to know that there's any corner of the ‘Net which has braved the slop-nami and come out unscathed, let alone one as large (if rather niche) as Newgrounds is.

So, if you're looking for human-made work produced after 2022…well, I don't know where to search for most things, but for art, music, games or animation, you already know where to start :P