New York artist Sam Lavin has created the SLOW LLM extension for Google Chrome, designed to intentionally slow down responses from popular chatbots.

The idea for the project arose after the developer noticed how heavily some of his students and acquaintances relied on generative tools for basic tasks.

This open-source application works with ChatGPT and Claude. A "corporate" version is also available through DNS servers, supporting more models. It allows for slowing down chatbot responses on a local network scale, such as in educational and corporate settings.

SLOW LLM does not interact directly with neural networks. Instead, it manipulates a feature of JavaScript by rewriting the Fetch function that returns data to the browser. When a user visits a chatbot domain and submits a query, the modification stretches the response time significantly.

“Many people start using AI tools to outsource their cognitive and emotional functions, forgetting all the basic things they were taught. I believe that the more people rely on LLMs, the stronger the trend of skill loss will become,” Lavin stated in an interview with 404 Media.

The artist argues that chatbots have taken the idea of "friction" to an extreme, suggesting that any inconvenience or difficulty should be outsourced to "thinking machines from Silicon Valley," even though overcoming these obstacles is part of what makes human creativity meaningful and valuable.

“Anything that eliminates the friction involved in solving complex problems hinders your learning and undermines the knowledge you’ve already gained,” he believes.

Lavin noted that no one has yet reported successful deployment of SLOW LLM in workplace or educational networks.

“I haven’t tested the extension on unsuspecting people yet, but I’m considering it. Maybe they’ll just quit their master’s programs in frustration,” the developer joked.

Artist's Creativity

Previously, the New York artist conducted similar digital performances. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, he released the Zoom Escaper app to "escape" from video calls, which filled the user's audio stream with annoying sounds.

In 2018, Lavin scraped publicly available LinkedIn profiles to create a database of ICE agents. This incident sparked controversy, and the published information about government employees was removed from platforms like GitHub and Medium.

Lavin's frequent collaborator, under the pseudonym Tega Brain, has released several browser tools like Slop Evader, which remove "junk" generative content by filtering search results after November 2022, the public launch date of ChatGPT.

“I conduct small experiments in digital sabotage, trying to create tools that slightly disrupt computational systems,” Lavin described his projects.

However, the artist does not consider himself an extreme anti-digitalist. He admitted that he used the Claude chatbot to write the code for SLOW LLM.

In March, ActivTrak analysts concluded that instead of easing workloads, artificial intelligence is currently only speeding up and complicating work processes.