Sick of seeing AI images everywhere online? DuckDuckGo will let you filter out the slop from your search results

• Popular search engine DuckDuckGo has added a new AI image-filtering tool
• Users can now remove AI-generated images from their search results
• It's available for free at duckduckgo.com

Popular privacy-first search engine DuckDuckGo is rolling out a new feature that lets users remove AI-generated images from their search results.

On X, the company tweeted, "Our philosophy about AI features is "private, useful, and optional.” Our goal is to help you find what you’re looking for. You should decide for yourself how much AI you want in your life – or if you want any at all.

To that end, we’ve added a new setting to hide AI-generated images in your results when you’re searching for images on DuckDuckGo."

The new AI filter feature has already started rolling out, and you can access it simply by searching on DuckDuckGo and selecting "hide AI images" from a new drop-down.

Considering the rapid rise of image- and video-generation tools on the internet, this new feature could be a compelling reason to finally switch from Google to DuckDuckGo.

If you're sick of all the AI content hogging your image searches, DuckDuckGo might be the way to go. That said, the company says, "The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist."

This means it won't catch 100% of all AI-generated content, but DuckDuckGo says, "it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.”

Taking back control

DuckDuckGo is planning to add more filters in the future, which should improve the rate at which the company's algorithm is able to weed out AI-generated content.

I've started to notice more and more AI-generated images in Google search over the last few months, and with tools like the best AI image generator from ChatGPT and Google's Veo 3 video generation easily accessible, online platforms are becoming more and more littered with AI slop.

While DuckDuckGo won't solve all your issues with AI images overnight, this new feature is the first step in giving users the choice on how they want to experience AI. If you can't stand AI images, DuckDuckGo might be the solution you've been waiting for.

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