Just did a Google image search as part of some research into something in the medieval era. Well over half of the results are from some kind of ai image generation site. Argh. Totally useless for research purposes.
Search engines need an "exclude AI content" option.
@quixoticgeek While not a universal “exclude AI filter”, it is possible to exclude specific sites from Google results, adding something like “-site:shitsite.com” to your search.
@quixoticgeek use Ecosia, Searx, Whoogle or any other fully private and FOSS search engine. Granted, you'll probably have to dig a little deep to find what you actually want, but it's still better than trying to make sense of all the AI BS that mainstream engines are now putting out there.
Good luck.
> Search engines need an "exclude AI content" option.
Reading that, I just had a vision of the future: that option will soon exist, but as a very expensive premium feature. Most people will not be able to afford it, they get only "AI"-crap all day long.
@quixoticgeek I'm liking the uBlacklist plugin (Firefox and Chrome) that lets you remove bad domains from your Google searches. Haven't tried it much with image searches yet, but give it a try?
@quixoticgeek
I'm given to understand that you can limit your query by date to before AI images were an issue, and there are other tricks to try as well, if you really must use Google Image Search.
@quixoticgeek Google themselves are an AI company, so I doubt they would implement a feature that would imply that AI-generated results might somehow not be useful to you.
@quixoticgeek I think it goes without saying, but the short version is: don't use search engines created and owned by companies who are currently spending billions on fake AI systems. Period. There are alternatives that don't.
@quixoticgeek I imagine your comments are full of them. I've personally been fairly satisfied with DuckDuckGo, but I would suggest in regards to research it's better to try to find specialist things (Wikipedia, articles about specific incidents of the time period, etc etc) as much as possible.
Unfortunately, the Internet is being slowly flooded with gaff, and that is going to be harder and harder to fight against I admit. :sadness:
@nazokiyoubinbou actually no. Not a lot of suggestions for alternatives. And Wikipedia is woefully lacking in many aspects. I'm trying to find the right citations so I can fix some articles in the areas I'm interested in. But it's slow work.
@quixoticgeek I'll admit to you that I'm not a researcher. Mostly I just want to say that any company you see investing heavily in treating LLMs as if they were AI is going to be harmful to anything where truth matters. (Aka everything really.) I think eventually even alternatives like DuckDuckGo are going to be affected as LLMs flood the Internet with "hallucinations" and such. It may be necessary soon to do things the old fashioned way. But for now maybe you can find period-specific sites?
@nazokiyoubinbou a few people did recommend a couple of good sites for info. Which is good. LLMs are bad, and I'm trying as hard as I can to avoid them where possible.
@quixoticgeek the web has been dead for years, and it's not AI that killed it. It's SEO "optimization" and googles complete unwillingness to discriminate between websites with value and copy/paste ad farm trash.
None of the trash would exist if it wasn't profitable. Google ads make them profitable.
@quixoticgeek I heard the advice that you can use the advanced settings for Google image search to limit the results to only images from before 2022 (or whatever) which has the effect of eliminating most AI images. I haven’t tried it myself.
@sangster@quixoticgeek yeah, it really feels like they’re on the downward slope of enshittification and I suppose folks will spend more time looking at ads if they have to stare at the results and dredge for quality themselves.
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