I like the idea and even considered contributing to the list, but this stopped me:
> NAQ (Never Asked Questions)
> My website is on your list!
> Cry about it.
That's quite a suspicious attitude. Clearly the maintainer believes he is infallible. I understand the emotions behind this, but this is not how a public blacklist should be maintained.
Yuuup. My personal website has been inaccessible to a few friends, they thought my server was down. It turned out they had some blocklist (not related to AI) installed on their PiHole, and for whatever reason my website was on that list. It is, in fact, to this day, because my request to unblock it went completely unanswered. I still don't know why the website is on the list.
Go to the Adguard GitHub (or use the extension) and report it. And get all your friends to switch to Adguard extension and Adguard Home (Pi Hole alternative) as blockers.
Easylist and its sublist are notorious for being poorly maintained and ignoring issues opened against it. Adguard is much more active in maintaining its lists. Especially Adguard its language blocklists have much, much less breakage and missed ads than Easylist.
If you know how to run a Pi Hole, you know how to run Adguard Home. And installing Chromium / Firefox / Safari extensions isn't exactly rocket science.
Perhaps it got hacked and was hosting malware without you being aware? They are pretty good at hiding it from the site owner (showing the original website to you, but not to others).
The server is and has been clean the whole time. I don't even run WordPress or anything similar on that server that would be a common hacking target. If it was hacked, I'm pretty sure Google Safe Browsing would be the first to flag the site, not some random PiHole list.
Probably because there's about the same chance of them being innocent as the "Help I was wrongfully banned by VAC :(((" posts in the Counterstrike community.
Reminder that false positives are not only possible but likely. I remember one instance where you could get people banned by sending them a specific string of characters over chat. Anticheat was scanning the entire contents of RAM looking for it.
These days anticheat software is likely to snap at anything. Who knows what they think of the development tools Hacker News users are likely to have on their computers? They really hate virtual machines for example. There's no telling how they'd react to a debugger or profiler.
Never claimed otherwise. Just saying it's a fact of life that every test has false positives and false negatives. The "is this player cheating" test is no exception.
Dude got so fed up with long loading times he debugged the game and not only discovered the cause but actually fixed it. Billion dollar corporation couldn't be assed to do it.
Gotta wonder if this guy wouldn't have gotten banned by the anticheat for having the audacity to hook into the game with a debugger or something. Only cheaters do that sort of thing right?
Yeah that would be a reasonable thing to ban for. Companies can't afford to audit every single unauthorized tampering with their software to ensure that it's benign. If it results in better cheat detection, far better to have a policy that's unobstrusive and non-applicable to 99.99% of users and something the marginal outliers will understand is a risk.
It's a false positive. He would get banned even though he was not cheating.
Whether it's "reasonable" or not comes down to politics. Optimizing for either false positives or false negatives is a policy decision. Do you punish innocents to ensure you catch every single cheater? Do you let cheaters go to ensure you don't punish innocents?
I don't really intend to discuss the above questions. I'm just pointing out the fact one of those so called complainers in the forums could very well turn out to be one of these false positives. That's what the system is optimized for.
I would add that with this attitude and how new this initiative is, there's very little chance it will still be updated 5 years from now. Really this sort of thing needs to come from Easylist or similar, who have a track record of maintaining these for years.
I don't understand the need for the author to commit the rest of his life to this or start a foundation. It is a good list for now and if its never updated again, that seems fine.
I find it a bit ironic that this site regularly talks about banning whole countries and IP ranges on our servers, then acts shocked when users do the same. The fact that somebody went to the effort to create and share this shows how poorly the public sees the web.
The reality we face is "Check your AdBlocker" is the new "Check your spam folder" and we should adjust accordingly.
Problem is if this becomes popular and people being lazy assume blocked site means slop without checking, then the repo has a lot of power to break innocent sites.
I don't have an answer because as you say with power comes people wrangling over power. And claw sloperators can be way more persistent!
Also seems a bit hypocritical given the screed about how such a list is necessary because the AI content might output hallucinations or damaging content without review.
But if it’s the author’s blocklist that is wrong, unverified, and causing harm to others? Cry about it.
The broad list seems to just be a hater list. It's not trying to cover cases of deception (passing off AI material as if it's something else), as it includes sites which are very open about what kind of content is on there.
Would you say the same about a block list that blocks anything else? I don't care how obvious an ad is, I don't want to see it. Same with social widgets or cookie consent banners, or newsletter sign-ups.
But I wouldn't call the person that maintains the news letter popup block list as "newsletter hater"
>Would you say the same about a block list that blocks anything else? I don't care how obvious an ad is, I don't want to see it. Same with social widgets or cookie consent banners, or newsletter sign-ups.
He's not complaining that widgets for his favorite social network site is getting blocked, he's complaining that anything vaguely related to social networks are getting banned. Some of the sites on that list are stuff like chatgpt.com, which might be AI related, but clearly doesn't fit the criteria of "AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines".
The purpose of the broad list is removing AI-generated content from search results, so that the user doesn't have to wade through (as much) slop to find the human-created content they're looking for.
While I applaud the honesty of sites that are open about their content being AI generated, that type of content is never what I'm looking for when I search, so if they're in my search results it's just more distraction/clutter drowning out whatever I'm actually looking for. Blocking them improves my search experience slightly, even though there is of course still lots of other unwanted results remaining.
Granted, I definitely count as an AI hater (speaking of LLM's specifically). But even if I weren't, I don't think I'd be seeking it out specifically using a search engine; why would I do that when I could just go straight to chatgpt or whatever myself? Search is usually where people go to find real human answers (which is why appending "reddit" to one's searches became so common). So I see this as a utility thing, more than a "I am blocking all this just because I hate it" thing. Although it can be both, certainly.
So there is a spreadsheet of websites. That is very interesting. There was an article here sometime ago about a media group who have so many super SEOd websites. They all have common footer text. I searched and added as many as I could find in uBlacklist. I have a gist listing them and how I searched for them. You might find that useful.
Oh good point I also overlooked that with the anti ai list.
The big anti ai list also seems to be focused on hiding links from ddg/bing/google where this new more focused list just blocks sites. I tend to like block ones vs hiding because they pop up a nice warning no matter where I came from and I can still decide to ignore it if I want so they is more user agency instead of just quietly hiding a unclear chunk of the net from search engines.
Ublock Origin also already has an “AI widget” blocklist you can enable. Literally the only extension that keeps me on Firefox because of how useless it is on Chromium.
Assuming you're talking about Manifest V2 deprecation: you can disable it in Chromium-based browsers by launching with `--disable-features=ExtensionManifestV2Unsupported,ExtensionManifestV2Disabled`, and enjoy uBlock once again. See also the github discussion: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...
Well, I understand you won’t lose any sleep, but this is conceptually stupid.
That would be like refusing to allow someone to buy a house because the last owner was a convicted of a crime. Sorry, we gotta demolish the house now! And nobody can live on the plot.
The owner of this repo is free to do whatever they want but I’m free to point out that it’s a dumb practice.
> That would be like refusing to allow someone to ...
You should stop thinking by analogies. You're doing a disservice to yourself and your thinking capacity.
> The owner of this repo is free to do whatever they want but I’m free to point out that it’s a dumb practice.
I find it very useful, just like most of its users, and if ever I were to find it necessary to use a website that's obviously blocked, I know how to unblock it. Most of the time I don't bother, so that's something for you to think.
Personally I find that I prefer badly written english or auto-translated stuff written in languages foreign to me over ai generated or even just ai polished works I've seen. There is just so much more character, depth and variance there vs ultra ai generic or slop text.
That being said this project seems focused on content farms not people who just need a little help writing so this whole conversation is a bit of a side tangent.
One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.
Capable doesn't mean capable of office work though, I could see someone with a language disorder doing electronics and have trouble with words, not numbers. Or someone who has trouble with written words specifically doing most of their learning with classes and videos.
Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.
> like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.
this is such an incredible way to phrase what it all looks like to the rest of us. and i suspect the people doing it, just like those with obvious cosmetic surgery, have no idea how weird and off it looks.
I have a similar coworker, but he's not great at prompting, so 10% of the time the AI version of himself makes confident assertions that he did not intend and are clearly not true. Genuinely no idea what I'm supposed to do about it.
Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.
Yeah I hate it when people do that and I always call them out on it.
Unfortunately our company is trying to be "AI First" so they'll just point to that and continue their bullshit.
Our company literally promotes AI slop over personally made content even if it's mediocre crap. All they care about is rising usage numbers of things like copilot in office.
I mean, I know it is probably tongue in cheek but that never-asked-question was particularly out of place. Massively generated AI contents are usually not THAT thoughtful anyway.
From experience: If you don't know Danish, please don't ever use machine translators to translate from English. Regardless of what some people may think, they make mistakes, so many mistakes.
I get why it's tempting, good translators are expensive, and few and far between. A friend of my is a professional translator and she's not exactly in need of work, but a lot of customers look at her prices and opt for machine translations instead and the result not always impressive. Errors range from wrong words, bad sentence structure to an inability to correctly translate cultural references.
Right, makes sense for Danes, or other population where English knowledge is basically ubiquitous. But I'm think it might look differently in other places, if the choice is between "Badly translated but I can understand 95% of it" and "In a language I don't understand at all, maybe 1% I could figure out", then the choice might be a bit different.
nope, let the user does the translation, with his own choice of tool and being thus perfectly aware of the shortcomings.
I know that some people translate my French posts to read them. That’s really cool. But I would never post something I didn’t write myself (but I use spellcheking tools. I even sometimes disagree with them)
Not everyone can. Try going to rural Spain and handing out flyers in English and ask them to translate it themselves, 0% of the people will translate it themselves, it'll go straight into the trash. If you instead hand them something in a language they understand, there is a least a chance they'll read it, even though probably 5% will do so.
It's sometimes useful to understand that the world is much bigger and varied than what you experience locally, and what works for you and the people in one country, doesn't always work the same everywhere.
There are levels to things. In a professional context (including product design and documentation/instructions) don‘t use machine translation[†].
For your personal hobby site or for general online communication, you probably shouldn’t use machine translation, but it is probably useful if have B1 language skills and are checking up on your grammar, vocabulary, etc. As for using LLMs to help you write, I certainly prefer people use the traditional models over LLMs, as the traditional models still require you to think and forces you to actually learn more about the output language.
For reading somebody else’s content in a language you don‘t understand, machine translation is fine up to a point, as long as you are aware that it may not be accurate.
---
† In fact I personally I think EU should mandate translator qualification, and probably would have only 20 years ago when consumer protection was still a thing they pretended to care about.
I use Grammarly at work (it's mostly to make sure our brand guidelines are kept) and I don't find that it (defaultly) corrects too far into the ai slop territory. It's mostly just making sure your sentence is correct.
Op is going after AI slop bot farms like android authority
Glad we're moving in this direction, I've also got a tool that I use to determine if writing is AI using common tropes and reconstruct the OG prompt from it: https://tropes.fyi/aidr
That's a curious one, Twitter is worthless anyway. Before AI bots proliferated, the change to rank paid accounts high in replies turned it into a de facto entry level $8/month advertising tier.
Love this, I wish there were more and broader categories of sites one could block. You can always temporarily allow sites.
In the enterprise space, there are URL reputation providers. They categorize sites based on different criteria, and network administrators block or warn users based on that information.
In my humble opinion, there needs to be a crowdsourced fund (or ideally governments would take this seriously and fund it on behalf of people) for enabling technologies that allow user friendly internet experiences. Browsers, frameworks, vpn providers, site-reputation, deceptive content, dns-providers, email providers,trusted certificate authorities(no,google and microsoft shouldn't get to police that), nation-state or corporate affiliations,etc... You shouldn't need to setup a pi-hole.
Imagine a $1B/yr non-profit fund for this stuff. if 10M people paid $10/mo that's $1.2B/yr. Proton has $97M revenue in 2024 and 100M total accounts (I don't know how many pay but the spread is roughly $1/user). I really think now is the time to talk about this when so many are wary of US tech giants and looking for other opportunities.
I'm the weirdo who just closes websites with too many ads, and just mostly powers through the ads. If you have a sane setup for ads I will use your website. I'm tired of the years of adblock drama. Every time I come to these threads its completely different names for adblock plugins, it's like a rat race.
I get this. uBO on Firefox has "just worked" for me for a long time with 0 configuration (I don't mess with the blacklists), but on phones it's a different game, and on Chrome, and before uBO there was other drama.
I would rather have a whitelist that adds a nice tag at the end of the link, indicating that overall it has high quality content. This also forces you to periodically check the sites you've whitelisted
Meta question: do you guys feel the adblockers will maybe not be that important in the future? As for myself, I ended up to use just a few websites, but those are reputable and I don't mind a few ads they provide. The only adblock which is still very much needed is one for Youtube.
I used to run pihole on a Pi and now I directly run unbound, still on a Pi. The difference on a great many sites is night and day: you simply get way fewer ads. And that's just by using a DNS blocklist.
Occasionally I'll get one site that refuses to load because I've got an "adblocker" but most sites do work fine, just with way fewer ads.
I usually now just ask agent, for example Gemini in Antigravity to check certain article or a group of articles, like "check all AI-related article in tldr.tech and tell what is interesting"... I am already a bit lazy to browse myself, and in this process I dont care about ads.
flip it, and build green(organic) lists
perhaps work towards having sites than dont just, not use AI, but never talk about it
it's not just AI, search is a scam, no mojo in the world can extract the contact info for the business next door and the mountains of porncoin, scamulous garbage and hate news
taking up a full 50% of whats left, does in fact make a determined effort to greenwall a section of the web something to consider
Admirable idea and execution…but it does apply opposing evolutionary/economic pressure for AI-slop to become less detectable over time. AI will learn and adapt.
Metaphorically speaking, it’s the Borg we’re dealing with, not the Klingons. All Janeway did was slow the Borg’s progress.
Cory Doctorow wrote a story ~20 years ago about how the first sentient machines would be spam bots because their job is to pass as human, and anti-spam systems provide competitive evolutionary pressure.
I think that's the one. I was a bit off on the timing, it's not 20 yet. Great read either way.
From the story:
“Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgement about whether their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from which they could learn. From there came the first machine-intelligence algorithms, and then my kind.”
I feel like this is a bit of a sinking ship. I suppose if you want to avoid known sources of slop then this works … but beyond that it’s a bit of a lost cause. It’s like sports betting — once it’s there then there’s no saying who is (ab)using it.
It's not perfect, but in time my search results have gone from the first several pages being mostly garbage to mostly all good. Sure, new spam sites crop up every few days, but it's a quick block.
Why? He posts high-quality content that's interesting if you care about that field. It's not my cup of tea, but it's pretty far from what this list tries to block.
I take it you're talking about the user here with the nick simonw? I find his comments on HN interesting and balanced: don't know why you think he should be filtered out.
I'd argue it's not meaningless because the point wasn't to show inclusion but power. Nobody went for master's degrees, "master" as a rank in video games, or anything else.
Reminds me of [1]twitch.tv trying to remove "blind playthrough" as a tag to encourage inclusive language.
So what? Your proposal is to change nothing, continue as is, and subtly continue using terms like "blacklist" as something bad and "whitelist" as something good... I don't think I understand your point. I don't see any real sense in it.
Unfortunately, MANY people still think this is nonsense and shouldn't be given attention. What you don't understand is that you subtly say that things from Black people are bad and things from white people are good. Do you know what that causes in the end?
A company "of Black people" applies for YC and has a higher chance of being rejected than a company of/for white people, even if it's a necessary solution. You doubt it? Try it!
No, I'm not proposing to change nothing, continue as is, nor do I use coded language to express my secret inner racism.
I'm saying that changing words like "blacklist" or "master" is purely performative and actually quite selfish. People do it to feel good about themselves for "helping" without actually having to do anything helpful. It's the moral equivalent of sending "thoughts and prayers".
I'm not saying that those who use these terms are racist. I'm saying that language evolves. If there are equivalent technical alternatives that don't carry a history of oppression, why not use them? It costs nothing and can make the environment more inclusive. This doesn't replace concrete actions, but it also doesn't prevent them from happening.
If changing a word is "purely performative," then keeping it is also purely performative. The difference is that one choice preserves a metaphor of domination and the other does not. Technology is made of choices. This is one too.
That means I won't bother fighting changes that became established before I was born. I most definitely doesn't mean I have to go along with every change I see proposed now.
> If there are equivalent technical alternatives that don't carry a history of oppression
No one chose to be born in a certain context.
But everyone participates in the context that they continue to feed or transform.
Do you recognize that you live in a system that produces racial inequality today?
If the answer is yes, then there is some level of participation, albeit minimal.
Because living in a structure is already being inside it.
If you are white, your ancestors did this. They created separation and made simple words dehumanize people. So yes, you and everyone else has a chance to make amends. The choice is yours.
I do use "blocklist" on new project and name my main "trunk" and not "master" but I'll both a) defend other's rights to use terms like blocklists and master and b) call out the virtue signalling ones who are trying to push a political agenda by trying to control thoughts (by attempting to control speech).
There's no political interest here. (Although I believe EVERYTHING is political, including not taking a stand!)
The only point I'm making is that (as a Black person) I have the authority to tell you that it's important and how I feel. You can defend whatever you want, I'm just communicating and SUGGESTING that you change the term.
What I find funny is that many here argue that we can't even SUGGEST. And they still say they're in favor of democracy. Oh, okay!
I like the idea and even considered contributing to the list, but this stopped me:
> NAQ (Never Asked Questions)
> My website is on your list!
> Cry about it.
That's quite a suspicious attitude. Clearly the maintainer believes he is infallible. I understand the emotions behind this, but this is not how a public blacklist should be maintained.
Yuuup. My personal website has been inaccessible to a few friends, they thought my server was down. It turned out they had some blocklist (not related to AI) installed on their PiHole, and for whatever reason my website was on that list. It is, in fact, to this day, because my request to unblock it went completely unanswered. I still don't know why the website is on the list.
Go to the Adguard GitHub (or use the extension) and report it. And get all your friends to switch to Adguard extension and Adguard Home (Pi Hole alternative) as blockers.
Easylist and its sublist are notorious for being poorly maintained and ignoring issues opened against it. Adguard is much more active in maintaining its lists. Especially Adguard its language blocklists have much, much less breakage and missed ads than Easylist.
>> And get all your friends to switch to Adguard extension and Adguard Home (Pi Hole alternative) as blockers.
Nice of you to slip this "easy" step into your advice. Give me a break!
..?
If you know how to run a Pi Hole, you know how to run Adguard Home. And installing Chromium / Firefox / Safari extensions isn't exactly rocket science.
The crux is in the sentence of yours:
>...all your friends to switch to ...<
:-))
Perhaps it got hacked and was hosting malware without you being aware? They are pretty good at hiding it from the site owner (showing the original website to you, but not to others).
The server is and has been clean the whole time. I don't even run WordPress or anything similar on that server that would be a common hacking target. If it was hacked, I'm pretty sure Google Safe Browsing would be the first to flag the site, not some random PiHole list.
PiHole should err on the side of false negatives, uBO on false positives. Difference being uBO only takes a click to disarm for a site.
Personally I don't want to introduce any chance of my DNS being a problem.
Not any more it seems: https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist/commit/7ebaa7...
Probably because there's about the same chance of them being innocent as the "Help I was wrongfully banned by VAC :(((" posts in the Counterstrike community.
Reminder that false positives are not only possible but likely. I remember one instance where you could get people banned by sending them a specific string of characters over chat. Anticheat was scanning the entire contents of RAM looking for it.
These days anticheat software is likely to snap at anything. Who knows what they think of the development tools Hacker News users are likely to have on their computers? They really hate virtual machines for example. There's no telling how they'd react to a debugger or profiler.
Yeah that's what the people love to say on the Steam forums when they've gotten busted in one of its many ban waves.
Both of you can be right.
Never claimed otherwise. Just saying it's a fact of life that every test has false positives and false negatives. The "is this player cheating" test is no exception.
Check out this amazing episode:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339
Dude got so fed up with long loading times he debugged the game and not only discovered the cause but actually fixed it. Billion dollar corporation couldn't be assed to do it.
Gotta wonder if this guy wouldn't have gotten banned by the anticheat for having the audacity to hook into the game with a debugger or something. Only cheaters do that sort of thing right?
Yeah that would be a reasonable thing to ban for. Companies can't afford to audit every single unauthorized tampering with their software to ensure that it's benign. If it results in better cheat detection, far better to have a policy that's unobstrusive and non-applicable to 99.99% of users and something the marginal outliers will understand is a risk.
It's a false positive. He would get banned even though he was not cheating.
Whether it's "reasonable" or not comes down to politics. Optimizing for either false positives or false negatives is a policy decision. Do you punish innocents to ensure you catch every single cheater? Do you let cheaters go to ensure you don't punish innocents?
I don't really intend to discuss the above questions. I'm just pointing out the fact one of those so called complainers in the forums could very well turn out to be one of these false positives. That's what the system is optimized for.
I would add that with this attitude and how new this initiative is, there's very little chance it will still be updated 5 years from now. Really this sort of thing needs to come from Easylist or similar, who have a track record of maintaining these for years.
I don't understand the need for the author to commit the rest of his life to this or start a foundation. It is a good list for now and if its never updated again, that seems fine.
If a blocklist doesn't get updated it is outdated in a week.
Some tools are useful without updates. A blocklist for AI content farms that are sprouting like crazy is not helpful if it isn't updated.
in that case they should just contribute to one of the existing, more established lists. We don't need n+1 standards...
Which lists is open to this kind of contribution?
You forgot:
> A personal list for uBlock Origin
Fork it then!
If the website is not AI slop, presumably they would remove it from the list.
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I agree.
I find it a bit ironic that this site regularly talks about banning whole countries and IP ranges on our servers, then acts shocked when users do the same. The fact that somebody went to the effort to create and share this shows how poorly the public sees the web.
The reality we face is "Check your AdBlocker" is the new "Check your spam folder" and we should adjust accordingly.
Problem is if this becomes popular and people being lazy assume blocked site means slop without checking, then the repo has a lot of power to break innocent sites.
I don't have an answer because as you say with power comes people wrangling over power. And claw sloperators can be way more persistent!
Also seems a bit hypocritical given the screed about how such a list is necessary because the AI content might output hallucinations or damaging content without review.
But if it’s the author’s blocklist that is wrong, unverified, and causing harm to others? Cry about it.
A new more grounded list focused on specifically blocking content farms and similar low quality sites.
A nice alternative to this very broad anti ai list: https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
Edit: Oh I should mention I found it through reddit and there is some good discussion there where they describe how they find stuff etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1r9uo3j/autom...
The broad list seems to just be a hater list. It's not trying to cover cases of deception (passing off AI material as if it's something else), as it includes sites which are very open about what kind of content is on there.
Would you say the same about a block list that blocks anything else? I don't care how obvious an ad is, I don't want to see it. Same with social widgets or cookie consent banners, or newsletter sign-ups.
But I wouldn't call the person that maintains the news letter popup block list as "newsletter hater"
>Would you say the same about a block list that blocks anything else? I don't care how obvious an ad is, I don't want to see it. Same with social widgets or cookie consent banners, or newsletter sign-ups.
He's not complaining that widgets for his favorite social network site is getting blocked, he's complaining that anything vaguely related to social networks are getting banned. Some of the sites on that list are stuff like chatgpt.com, which might be AI related, but clearly doesn't fit the criteria of "AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines".
Its an AI block list. Not an "AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines" block list.
The purpose of the broad list is removing AI-generated content from search results, so that the user doesn't have to wade through (as much) slop to find the human-created content they're looking for.
While I applaud the honesty of sites that are open about their content being AI generated, that type of content is never what I'm looking for when I search, so if they're in my search results it's just more distraction/clutter drowning out whatever I'm actually looking for. Blocking them improves my search experience slightly, even though there is of course still lots of other unwanted results remaining.
Granted, I definitely count as an AI hater (speaking of LLM's specifically). But even if I weren't, I don't think I'd be seeking it out specifically using a search engine; why would I do that when I could just go straight to chatgpt or whatever myself? Search is usually where people go to find real human answers (which is why appending "reddit" to one's searches became so common). So I see this as a utility thing, more than a "I am blocking all this just because I hate it" thing. Although it can be both, certainly.
Edit: removed an off-topic tangent
If my goal is not seeing AI slop, I don't particularly care whether it is honestly labelled or not.
So there is a spreadsheet of websites. That is very interesting. There was an article here sometime ago about a media group who have so many super SEOd websites. They all have common footer text. I searched and added as many as I could find in uBlacklist. I have a gist listing them and how I searched for them. You might find that useful.
Edit: https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6573b27441d99a0a0c792431...
Hasn't been updated in 5 months
Oh good point I also overlooked that with the anti ai list.
The big anti ai list also seems to be focused on hiding links from ddg/bing/google where this new more focused list just blocks sites. I tend to like block ones vs hiding because they pop up a nice warning no matter where I came from and I can still decide to ignore it if I want so they is more user agency instead of just quietly hiding a unclear chunk of the net from search engines.
Thanks, I added both lists
Ublock Origin also already has an “AI widget” blocklist you can enable. Literally the only extension that keeps me on Firefox because of how useless it is on Chromium.
Assuming you're talking about Manifest V2 deprecation: you can disable it in Chromium-based browsers by launching with `--disable-features=ExtensionManifestV2Unsupported,ExtensionManifestV2Disabled`, and enjoy uBlock once again. See also the github discussion: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...
Not necessarily disagreeing the whole principle...
> All I hear is skill issue. Imagine needing an AI to write stuff.
Grammarly users (and underrepresented non-English speakers) would complain.
There’s not a single group who’s ever been told skill issue that didn’t complain
Sure, but there also plenty of times “get gud!” is used for gate keeping. Life is on a continuum, man.
This specific list from this specific author isn’t worth using since they refuse to remove items from the list if domain ownership changes.
E.g., bought a domain that previously hosted AI content.
E.g., Whitehouse.com used to be a porn site, now it’s not.
> E.g., bought a domain that previously hosted AI content.
Before buying a domain you should check if it's present in blacklists.
> Whitehouse.com used to be a porn site, now it’s not.
I won't lose sleep over that.
Well, I understand you won’t lose any sleep, but this is conceptually stupid.
That would be like refusing to allow someone to buy a house because the last owner was a convicted of a crime. Sorry, we gotta demolish the house now! And nobody can live on the plot.
The owner of this repo is free to do whatever they want but I’m free to point out that it’s a dumb practice.
> That would be like refusing to allow someone to ...
You should stop thinking by analogies. You're doing a disservice to yourself and your thinking capacity.
> The owner of this repo is free to do whatever they want but I’m free to point out that it’s a dumb practice.
I find it very useful, just like most of its users, and if ever I were to find it necessary to use a website that's obviously blocked, I know how to unblock it. Most of the time I don't bother, so that's something for you to think.
Personally I find that I prefer badly written english or auto-translated stuff written in languages foreign to me over ai generated or even just ai polished works I've seen. There is just so much more character, depth and variance there vs ultra ai generic or slop text.
That being said this project seems focused on content farms not people who just need a little help writing so this whole conversation is a bit of a side tangent.
One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.
"One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate."
I cannot imagine what it means. To me it reads like "I know someone who can run very fast but has no legs."
Capable doesn't mean capable of office work though, I could see someone with a language disorder doing electronics and have trouble with words, not numbers. Or someone who has trouble with written words specifically doing most of their learning with classes and videos.
Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.
> like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.
this is such an incredible way to phrase what it all looks like to the rest of us. and i suspect the people doing it, just like those with obvious cosmetic surgery, have no idea how weird and off it looks.
I have a similar coworker, but he's not great at prompting, so 10% of the time the AI version of himself makes confident assertions that he did not intend and are clearly not true. Genuinely no idea what I'm supposed to do about it.
Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.
Sam, and when you ask them a deeper question about it on a call they usually have no idea. It’s making people very lazy.
Yeah I hate it when people do that and I always call them out on it.
Unfortunately our company is trying to be "AI First" so they'll just point to that and continue their bullshit.
Our company literally promotes AI slop over personally made content even if it's mediocre crap. All they care about is rising usage numbers of things like copilot in office.
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I mean, I know it is probably tongue in cheek but that never-asked-question was particularly out of place. Massively generated AI contents are usually not THAT thoughtful anyway.
If you don't know English and you want to write English anyway, please just use a machine translator.
From experience: If you don't know Danish, please don't ever use machine translators to translate from English. Regardless of what some people may think, they make mistakes, so many mistakes.
I get why it's tempting, good translators are expensive, and few and far between. A friend of my is a professional translator and she's not exactly in need of work, but a lot of customers look at her prices and opt for machine translations instead and the result not always impressive. Errors range from wrong words, bad sentence structure to an inability to correctly translate cultural references.
I meant in contexts like online discussions, not like a news article or something. Is the result completely unintelligible, or just not great?
Right, makes sense for Danes, or other population where English knowledge is basically ubiquitous. But I'm think it might look differently in other places, if the choice is between "Badly translated but I can understand 95% of it" and "In a language I don't understand at all, maybe 1% I could figure out", then the choice might be a bit different.
nope, let the user does the translation, with his own choice of tool and being thus perfectly aware of the shortcomings.
I know that some people translate my French posts to read them. That’s really cool. But I would never post something I didn’t write myself (but I use spellcheking tools. I even sometimes disagree with them)
> let the user does the translation
Not everyone can. Try going to rural Spain and handing out flyers in English and ask them to translate it themselves, 0% of the people will translate it themselves, it'll go straight into the trash. If you instead hand them something in a language they understand, there is a least a chance they'll read it, even though probably 5% will do so.
It's sometimes useful to understand that the world is much bigger and varied than what you experience locally, and what works for you and the people in one country, doesn't always work the same everywhere.
There are levels to things. In a professional context (including product design and documentation/instructions) don‘t use machine translation[†].
For your personal hobby site or for general online communication, you probably shouldn’t use machine translation, but it is probably useful if have B1 language skills and are checking up on your grammar, vocabulary, etc. As for using LLMs to help you write, I certainly prefer people use the traditional models over LLMs, as the traditional models still require you to think and forces you to actually learn more about the output language.
For reading somebody else’s content in a language you don‘t understand, machine translation is fine up to a point, as long as you are aware that it may not be accurate.
---
† In fact I personally I think EU should mandate translator qualification, and probably would have only 20 years ago when consumer protection was still a thing they pretended to care about.
And the machine translator is using AI to translate the text
Yes, AI as a term existed well before OpenAI and ChatGPT and such.
Why? A model correcting your errors is a powerful tool to learn the language, much better than just writing the phrase in your native language.
…what? no? why?
I use Grammarly at work (it's mostly to make sure our brand guidelines are kept) and I don't find that it (defaultly) corrects too far into the ai slop territory. It's mostly just making sure your sentence is correct.
Op is going after AI slop bot farms like android authority
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I mean, the reason we use grammarly is because we recognize we have a skill issue.
At least we're not yet in the phase where we have a whitelist for the internet.
We were close but the app dominance declined.
Glad we're moving in this direction, I've also got a tool that I use to determine if writing is AI using common tropes and reconstruct the OG prompt from it: https://tropes.fyi/aidr
Haha, that's a neat idea. Thanks for sharing.
https://tropes.fyi/aidr/b184cf3a
https://tropes.fyi/aidr/9b132f92
Also check the https://botblock.ai/ , AI extension to detect AI replies on twitter
A better option is to stop using it entirely.
That's a curious one, Twitter is worthless anyway. Before AI bots proliferated, the change to rank paid accounts high in replies turned it into a de facto entry level $8/month advertising tier.
Does it even work?
I ask becaue it considers @lilycoy__ (an obvious AI generated account, as quoted by Robin Hanson <https://x.com/robinhanson/status/2025332066552819782>) to be "100% human"
https://i.imgur.com/NQHVcdM.png
Love this, I wish there were more and broader categories of sites one could block. You can always temporarily allow sites.
In the enterprise space, there are URL reputation providers. They categorize sites based on different criteria, and network administrators block or warn users based on that information.
In my humble opinion, there needs to be a crowdsourced fund (or ideally governments would take this seriously and fund it on behalf of people) for enabling technologies that allow user friendly internet experiences. Browsers, frameworks, vpn providers, site-reputation, deceptive content, dns-providers, email providers,trusted certificate authorities(no,google and microsoft shouldn't get to police that), nation-state or corporate affiliations,etc... You shouldn't need to setup a pi-hole.
Imagine a $1B/yr non-profit fund for this stuff. if 10M people paid $10/mo that's $1.2B/yr. Proton has $97M revenue in 2024 and 100M total accounts (I don't know how many pay but the spread is roughly $1/user). I really think now is the time to talk about this when so many are wary of US tech giants and looking for other opportunities.
I'm the weirdo who just closes websites with too many ads, and just mostly powers through the ads. If you have a sane setup for ads I will use your website. I'm tired of the years of adblock drama. Every time I come to these threads its completely different names for adblock plugins, it's like a rat race.
I get this. uBO on Firefox has "just worked" for me for a long time with 0 configuration (I don't mess with the blacklists), but on phones it's a different game, and on Chrome, and before uBO there was other drama.
The problem is that ads have often been vectors for malware.
Not all, but blocking ads makes sites load 10x faster.
I would rather have a whitelist that adds a nice tag at the end of the link, indicating that overall it has high quality content. This also forces you to periodically check the sites you've whitelisted
Why is apnews.com on the list?
It seems to have been added as part of a commit[1] pulling from an SEO company's internal inventory document.
[1] https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist/commit/f6ee8d...
Tragic twist: repo was entirely AI generated
media.tenor.com/oW5zO_6gu5gAAAAi/theomegaoof-emoji.gif
Meta question: do you guys feel the adblockers will maybe not be that important in the future? As for myself, I ended up to use just a few websites, but those are reputable and I don't mind a few ads they provide. The only adblock which is still very much needed is one for Youtube.
According to uBlock Origin it blocked 9.5 million requests to ads/third party trackers since I installed it. So yes, it's very much needed.
I used to run pihole on a Pi and now I directly run unbound, still on a Pi. The difference on a great many sites is night and day: you simply get way fewer ads. And that's just by using a DNS blocklist.
Occasionally I'll get one site that refuses to load because I've got an "adblocker" but most sites do work fine, just with way fewer ads.
I usually now just ask agent, for example Gemini in Antigravity to check certain article or a group of articles, like "check all AI-related article in tldr.tech and tell what is interesting"... I am already a bit lazy to browse myself, and in this process I dont care about ads.
I feel that blocking, substituting, and even inserting user-defined resources for a website must be a native browser feature.
I dont think this is a sign of the times or the future. I think its just your own personal browsing habits.
flip it, and build green(organic) lists perhaps work towards having sites than dont just, not use AI, but never talk about it it's not just AI, search is a scam, no mojo in the world can extract the contact info for the business next door and the mountains of porncoin, scamulous garbage and hate news taking up a full 50% of whats left, does in fact make a determined effort to greenwall a section of the web something to consider
AI-generated content vs human-generated content is merging as such a fast pace that such a list doesn't seem like a scalable general solution
Firefox already feeling more responsive.
Admirable idea and execution…but it does apply opposing evolutionary/economic pressure for AI-slop to become less detectable over time. AI will learn and adapt.
Metaphorically speaking, it’s the Borg we’re dealing with, not the Klingons. All Janeway did was slow the Borg’s progress.
Cory Doctorow wrote a story ~20 years ago about how the first sentient machines would be spam bots because their job is to pass as human, and anti-spam systems provide competitive evolutionary pressure.
He may not be too far off.
This one?
https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocke...
I think that's the one. I was a bit off on the timing, it's not 20 yet. Great read either way.
From the story:
“Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgement about whether their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from which they could learn. From there came the first machine-intelligence algorithms, and then my kind.”
It's actually rather difficult for SoTA models to shift tone without losing performance on various datasets, so not such a one-sided arms race.
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I feel like this is a bit of a sinking ship. I suppose if you want to avoid known sources of slop then this works … but beyond that it’s a bit of a lost cause. It’s like sports betting — once it’s there then there’s no saying who is (ab)using it.
It's not perfect, but in time my search results have gone from the first several pages being mostly garbage to mostly all good. Sure, new spam sites crop up every few days, but it's a quick block.
What happens if a legitimate site (forums, wiki, etc) gets mass-spammed with slop?
I ceases to be legitimate.
Registration process requiring a trivial task like "introduce yourself", 24 hour account activation delay, and email a one time login-code every time.
The bots and SEO spammers already fill sites with garbage =3
Then that is the webmaster's problem and not mine, I'd want it blocked.
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Why? He posts high-quality content that's interesting if you care about that field. It's not my cup of tea, but it's pretty far from what this list tries to block.
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I take it you're talking about the user here with the nick simonw? I find his comments on HN interesting and balanced: don't know why you think he should be filtered out.
His articles are _about_ AI though, not AI slop?
Come on guys, 2026 and you still using "blacklist". Why not BlockList?
Because changing blacklist to blocklist, master to main, etc. is a meaningless act of virtue signalling.
I'd argue it's not meaningless because the point wasn't to show inclusion but power. Nobody went for master's degrees, "master" as a rank in video games, or anything else.
Reminds me of [1]twitch.tv trying to remove "blind playthrough" as a tag to encourage inclusive language.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/k7dvgw/twitch_remov...
GitHub changed the default branch name from master to main.
So what? Your proposal is to change nothing, continue as is, and subtly continue using terms like "blacklist" as something bad and "whitelist" as something good... I don't think I understand your point. I don't see any real sense in it.
Unfortunately, MANY people still think this is nonsense and shouldn't be given attention. What you don't understand is that you subtly say that things from Black people are bad and things from white people are good. Do you know what that causes in the end?
A company "of Black people" applies for YC and has a higher chance of being rejected than a company of/for white people, even if it's a necessary solution. You doubt it? Try it!
No, I'm not proposing to change nothing, continue as is, nor do I use coded language to express my secret inner racism.
I'm saying that changing words like "blacklist" or "master" is purely performative and actually quite selfish. People do it to feel good about themselves for "helping" without actually having to do anything helpful. It's the moral equivalent of sending "thoughts and prayers".
I'm not saying that those who use these terms are racist. I'm saying that language evolves. If there are equivalent technical alternatives that don't carry a history of oppression, why not use them? It costs nothing and can make the environment more inclusive. This doesn't replace concrete actions, but it also doesn't prevent them from happening.
If changing a word is "purely performative," then keeping it is also purely performative. The difference is that one choice preserves a metaphor of domination and the other does not. Technology is made of choices. This is one too.
> I'm saying that language evolves.
That means I won't bother fighting changes that became established before I was born. I most definitely doesn't mean I have to go along with every change I see proposed now.
> If there are equivalent technical alternatives that don't carry a history of oppression
Words are not oppression.
No one chose to be born in a certain context. But everyone participates in the context that they continue to feed or transform.
Do you recognize that you live in a system that produces racial inequality today?
If the answer is yes, then there is some level of participation, albeit minimal. Because living in a structure is already being inside it.
If you are white, your ancestors did this. They created separation and made simple words dehumanize people. So yes, you and everyone else has a chance to make amends. The choice is yours.
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> It costs nothing
It cost time and coding work to make the change.
Whatever the cost! You spend money on trivial things, why not on important things?
I do use "blocklist" on new project and name my main "trunk" and not "master" but I'll both a) defend other's rights to use terms like blocklists and master and b) call out the virtue signalling ones who are trying to push a political agenda by trying to control thoughts (by attempting to control speech).
There's no political interest here. (Although I believe EVERYTHING is political, including not taking a stand!)
The only point I'm making is that (as a Black person) I have the authority to tell you that it's important and how I feel. You can defend whatever you want, I'm just communicating and SUGGESTING that you change the term.
What I find funny is that many here argue that we can't even SUGGEST. And they still say they're in favor of democracy. Oh, okay!
As another black person (3rd gen Ghanaian, sp), you can get lost, and you have no 'authority' (really?) at all to tell me/ others how you feel.
Blacklist it is, for me.
Eu-based, fwiw. As i grew up we were coloUred, for a while, and then 'black' became the easy way to descibe ourselves.
Now we just need scientists to agree on something other than black hole.
What is the color of the black hole?