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.
I am finding myself more and more just tuning out altogether.
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.
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.
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..2022-11-29here’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.
…ffffffuuuuuuuuck
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.
You can also just vibe code an extension to do the same.
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Before, I mostly asked: “Is this outdated?”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 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’ve been going to the library a lot more lately.
There have been a struggle with AI books flooding since 2023
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. :/
Luckily recipes stay relevant for many many years
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.
