AI uBlock Blacklist

https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist

by rdmuser • 5 months ago

295 125 5 months ago

rdmuser3• 5 months ago

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...

xnx• 5 months ago

Hasn't been updated in 5 months

rdmuser3• 5 months ago

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.

Dwedit2• 5 months ago

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.

malfist2• 5 months ago

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"

hogwasher• 5 months ago

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

lawtalkinghuman• 5 months ago

If my goal is not seeing AI slop, I don't particularly care whether it is honestly labelled or not.

smusamashah• 5 months ago

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...

tkel• 5 months ago

Thanks, I added both lists

lifthrasiir2• 5 months ago

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.

rdmuser3• 5 months ago

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.

lifthrasiir2• 5 months ago

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.

flkiwi3• 5 months ago

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.

rererereferred• 5 months ago

I mean, the reason we use grammarly is because we recognize we have a skill issue.

jofzar• 5 months ago

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

QuadmasterXLII• 5 months ago

There’s not a single group who’s ever been told skill issue that didn’t complain

tclancy• 5 months ago

Sure, but there also plenty of times “get gud!” is used for gate keeping. Life is on a continuum, man.

duskdozer4• 5 months ago

If you don't know English and you want to write English anyway, please just use a machine translator.

GaggiX• 5 months ago

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.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r• 5 months ago

…what? no? why?

victorbjorklund• 5 months ago

And the machine translator is using AI to translate the text

mrweasel• 5 months ago

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.

dangus2• 5 months ago

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.

ragall3• 5 months ago

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.

afcool83• 5 months ago

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.

mapontosevenths2• 5 months ago

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.

tetris11• 5 months ago

This one?

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocke...

alansaber• 5 months ago

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.

Dwedit2• 5 months ago

What happens if a legitimate site (forums, wiki, etc) gets mass-spammed with slop?

harladsinsteden• 5 months ago

I ceases to be legitimate.

Joel_Mckay• 5 months ago

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

KomoD• 5 months ago

Then that is the webmaster's problem and not mine, I'd want it blocked.

firebot• 5 months ago

Firefox already feeling more responsive.

metalman• 5 months ago

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

amelius• 5 months ago

At least we're not yet in the phase where we have a whitelist for the internet.

papichulo2023• 5 months ago

We were close but the app dominance declined.

throwatdem12311• 5 months ago

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.

stratos123• 5 months ago

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...

dimava• 5 months ago

Also check the https://botblock.ai/ , AI extension to detect AI replies on twitter

add-sub-mul-div• 5 months ago

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.

srid• 5 months ago

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

driverdan• 5 months ago

A better option is to stop using it entirely.

quiet35• 5 months ago

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.

TonyTrapp2• 5 months ago

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.

VladVladikoff• 5 months ago

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).

jorvi2• 5 months ago

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.

zadikian2• 5 months ago

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.

NeutralCrane• 5 months ago

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_biot• 5 months ago

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.

Larrikin2• 5 months ago

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.

Drupon3• 5 months ago

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.

matheusmoreira3• 5 months ago

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.

DrammBA• 5 months ago

You forgot:

A personal list for uBlock Origin

ycombinatrix• 5 months ago

If the website is not AI slop, presumably they would remove it from the list.

Chris2048• 5 months ago

Not any more it seems: https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist/commit/7ebaa7...

wasmainiac• 5 months ago

Fork it then!

ramon156• 5 months ago

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

ossa-ma• 5 months ago

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

mh-• 5 months ago

Haha, that's a neat idea. Thanks for sharing.

https://tropes.fyi/aidr/b184cf3a

https://tropes.fyi/aidr/9b132f92

semiinfinitely• 5 months ago

Tragic twist: repo was entirely AI generated

mixtureoftakes• 5 months ago

media.tenor.com/oW5zO_6gu5gAAAAi/theomegaoof-emoji.gif

filldorns7• 5 months ago

Come on guys, 2026 and you still using "blacklist". Why not BlockList?

charonn02• 5 months ago

Because changing blacklist to blocklist, master to main, etc. is a meaningless act of virtue signalling.

Thanemate• 5 months ago

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...

filldorns7• 5 months ago

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!

TacticalCoder2• 5 months ago

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).

filldorns7• 5 months ago

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!

nosrepa• 5 months ago

Now we just need scientists to agree on something other than black hole.

filldorns7• 5 months ago

What is the color of the black hole?

notepad0x90• 5 months ago

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.

greyman2• 5 months ago

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.

diath• 5 months ago

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.

xboxnolifes• 5 months ago

I dont think this is a sign of the times or the future. I think its just your own personal browsing habits.

Grom_PE• 5 months ago

I feel that blocking, substituting, and even inserting user-defined resources for a website must be a native browser feature.

TacticalCoder2• 5 months ago

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.

greyman2• 5 months ago

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.

jadar• 5 months ago

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.

duskdozer4• 5 months ago

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.

lkm0• 5 months ago

Why is apnews.com on the list?

dgares• 5 months ago

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...

rishabhaiover• 5 months ago

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

giancarlostoro• 5 months ago

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.

dotancohen• 5 months ago

The problem is that ads have often been vectors for malware.

nottorp• 5 months ago

Not all, but blocking ads makes sites load 10x faster.

zadikian2• 5 months ago

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.

AI uBlock Blacklist

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