I have truly noticed a change in how I am engaging with content nowadays, I have become more reluctant on clicking on links to articles or videos that have been made in these last few years, and when I do I started by looking for clues if it has been generated by ai. if the voice is human or generated, if the pictures are of real events or slop. I mistrust everything. and it's exhausting. earlier slop was easier to detect nowadays it's becoming impossible.

It's so tiring, I agree.

For stuff relating the monetization, I can see the financial motivation to cut corners or just pass off others work as your own. Tale as old as time.

But for creative little indie things that you just share for no clout? Admittedly it's rare, but I still see it here and there, like book covers for fanfic etc—that shit fuckin boggles me.

Like if you aren't doing this for money or clout, why aren't you just sharing 100% your own creativity? Isn't that the reason to share creative stuff, to share a part of your "soul" with others and hope to genuinely touch someone, across time and space?

I can even understand someone who just likes ai generating stuff and thinks it's fun and cool (I disagree, but I understand it). But then why not just say you made it with an LLM, and point out which parts are yours and which parts are generated? Why try to "trick" people into thinking they've made a genuine connection?

I've been filtering my search results to not show anything after 2020 for a while now. The only annoying thing is that I have to do it every time I search, I'd love a way to set it as default.

What really boggles me is when I open a game and the ui buttons are ai. Why? It must have taken you longer to have your engine generate those graphics than it would've to just grabbed some royalty free ones. I really don't understand it. I've even seen what are clearly ai generated emojis as buttons.

You could write a bash script to do it and perform searches from the terminal. It will open a new tab or window in your browser with the term you entered with the appropriate settings. Then set the bash script as an alias to make it easier to use. I found a similar script and modified it for ddg. doesn't seem to work 100% though, per usual it works on my machine, as-is no warranty, you need to install jq first if you already haven't.

#!/bin/bash

# Check if a search term was provided
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <search_term>"
    exit 1
fi

# URL encode the search term (handles spaces and special characters)
encoded_search=$(printf '%s' "$1" | jq -sRr @uri)

# Construct the DuckDuckGo search URL with a date filter for content before Jan 1, 2020
duckduckgo_url="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%24encoded_search&ia=web&t=h_&df=on&dfdate=before-2020-01-01"

# Open the URL in a new browser tab (works with most common browsers)
xdg-open "$duckduckgo_url" 2>/dev/null || open "$duckduckgo_url"

I wanted to watch some videos on the house centipede today (just wanted to see it move) and the first many videos where just AI edited with AI voice. Real video clips though.

I recently found what looked like a good resource on semiconductors and it even had a sick feature where you could download parts (or all of it) in a pdf and it was really nicely typeset! I tried finding out if the name of the website was someone you could trust (like a professor) or if others had mentioned using the website but I didn't find anything. I then got the awful suspicion that it's all just fucking AI generated...

These fucking clankers ruined the internet.

Things always become worse because there are incentives to make them worse. Probably a series of management decisions that demanded or encourages ai usage and that was the result so far.

I am finding myself more and more just tuning out altogether.

a custom search string URL may be what you're looking for

for example, I use the following with the Fennec fork of Firefox Android to restrict the date to before the public launch of ChatGPT, while simultaneously disabling DuckDuckGo's AI features:

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s&df=1979-01-01..2022-11-29

here's DDG's guide on search URL parameters; most major search engines should have similar documentation

Tested by searching for "Avengers Doomsday" which shouldn't have returned anything about the movie this year.

It did. A lot.

You can also just vibe code an extension to do the same.

A lot of content creators have started adding a few seconds of voice over to the beginning of videos because people will immediately stop watching a video if they are at all suspicious that it's AI generated and the dead give away is the AI voice.

Or skip the search engine:

"Tell me about the ecology of Namibia. Use only sources from before 2022 because I do not trust LLM generated output. Make no mistakes."

Your post was created after 2022....

...ffffffuuuuuuuuck

I’ve been going to the library a lot more lately.

wow! I'd love to do that again! how did you "restart"?

like book covers for fanfic etc—that shit fuckin boggles me. Like if you aren’t doing this for money or clout, why aren’t you just sharing 100% your own creativity?

Because fanfic authors are not visual artists, so they lack the skill. But probably still want the visual appeal and associations that come with having a (non-stock) book cover.

Isn’t that the reason to share creative stuff, to share a part of your “soul” with others and hope to genuinely touch someone, across time and space?

I think that's getting a bit metaphysical. I think for a lot of people it's just the impulse to share something neat. The mere fact that you think it's neat means you're sharing something of yourself, just not on this soul-bearing level that you're talking about. It's like the difference between sharing a cute cat pic and sharing your true thoughts on your own cat whom you love and cherish.

Honestly, between this, the growing gap between climate action and its consequences, and the march towards fascism, the brain kind or has to tune out for self preservation.

There have been a struggle with AI books flooding since 2023

I get this. The weird part is that AI was supposed to make information easier to access, but it has also massively increased the cost of deciding whether information is worth trusting.

Before, I mostly asked: “Is this outdated?” Now I often ask: “Did anyone actually research or experience this, or is it just a plausible-looking summary generated from other summaries?”

What bothers me most isn't even that AI-generated content can be wrong. Humans have always written garbage. It's that producing convincing garbage has become essentially free, so the ratio of signal to noise is getting worse.

I don't think “before 2022 = trustworthy” is a reliable rule either, but I understand why older content can feel more valuable now: at least you know it wasn't produced by the current wave of generative-AI content farms.

You used to be able to identify morons just by grammar and spelling errors. Now you have to judge it by the content, which is more time consuming and difficult. It's to the point where I have to use AI to sift through a web search because of the AI generated trash everywhere. At some point the AI generated trash will become the dominant form of content and not even an AI will be able to sift through it.

It is SO much harder to find recipes now. Just yesterday I went into newpipe to look for tomato sauce recipes, just idk, as a refresher, and we got AI nonnas giving video essays over ai slop. Just stahhpp. :/

It would be rad if AI backlash caused a resurgence of 'Bespoke Handcrafted Organic' websites that are super crunchy and not mobile friendly at all.

I felt this.

Not just because it because irrelevant but because of how a lot of older content was presented. A lot of it was visually unappealing, sometimes outdated and oftentimes convoluted.

Unfortunately this doesn't make sifting through content any easier. You still have to look for the aforementioned issues in older content.

big if true

Luckily recipes stay relevant for many many years

General PSA that you can have nice bespoke websites written by paw that are fine on mobile! CSS has a lot of neat stuff these days, and also making things mobile-friendly doesn't have to involve Awful Corporate Design Trends.

-- Frost