AI uBlock Blacklist

[quiet35]

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.

[TonyTrapp]

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.

[Chris2048]

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

[Drupon]

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.

[the_biot]

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.

[DrammBA]

You forgot:

> A personal list for uBlock Origin

[wasmainiac]

Fork it then!

[ycombinatrix]

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

[NeutralCrane]

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.

[rdmuser]

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...

[Dwedit]

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.

[smusamashah]

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...

[xnx]

Hasn't been updated in 5 months

[tkel]

Thanks, I added both lists

[throwatdem12311]

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]

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...

[lifthrasiir]

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.

[QuadmasterXLII]

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

[dangus]

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.

[rdmuser]

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.

[duskdozer]

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

[jofzar]

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

[rererereferred]

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

[amelius]

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

[papichulo2023]

We were close but the app dominance declined.

[ossa-ma]

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-]

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

https://tropes.fyi/aidr/b184cf3a

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

[dimava]

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

[driverdan]

A better option is to stop using it entirely.

[add-sub-mul-div]

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]

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

[notepad0x90]

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.

[giancarlostoro]

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.

[zadikian]

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.

[dotancohen]

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

[ramon156]

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

[lkm0]

Why is apnews.com on the list?

[dgares]

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...

[semiinfinitely]

Tragic twist: repo was entirely AI generated

[mixtureoftakes]

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

[greyman]

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]

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.

[TacticalCoder]

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.

[Grom_PE]

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

[xboxnolifes]

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

[metalman]

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

[rishabhaiover]

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

[firebot]

Firefox already feeling more responsive.

[afcool83]

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.

[mapontosevenths]

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.

[alansaber]

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.

[jadar]

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.

[duskdozer]

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.

[Dwedit]

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

[harladsinsteden]

I ceases to be legitimate.

[Joel_Mckay]

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]

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

[nicbou]

Why? He posts high-quality content that's interesting if you care about that field. It's not my cup of tea, but it's pretty far from what this list tries to block.

[TacticalCoder]

I take it you're talking about the user here with the nick simonw? I find his comments on HN interesting and balanced: don't know why you think he should be filtered out.

[eclipticplane]

His articles are _about_ AI though, not AI slop?

[filldorns]

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

[charonn0]

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

[TacticalCoder]

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).

[nosrepa]

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