It is a symptom of how slop is overwhelming actual results, because regular sites that use AI to ‘save costs’ will just perpetuate the slop and when 99% of results are slop then it doesn’t matter what your settings are.
This would still show up even if it was set to hide though right? This is an image result on a third party site. Imo its worse because theres no disclosure that its even AI
If you don’t want AI-generated images to show up in DuckDuckGo image search results, you can filter them out a few different ways:
Anytime you’re viewing image search results in the Images tab on DuckDuckGo search, you can click the AI images filter and select Hide to reload results without AI-generated content.
Alternatively, open Search Settings > General or Search Settings > AI Features and turn on Hide AI-Generated Images.
Finally, if you want a search experience without AI-generated images, without Search Assist answers, and without Duck.ai prompts and entry points, start your searches on noai.duckduckgo.com instead of duckduckgo.com.
How does DuckDuckGo filter out AI-generated images in search results?
We rely on publicly available lists to filter out AI-generated content, like those provided by uBlockOrigin & uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist, an open-source blocklist, manually curated by project contributors.
These lists are not exhaustive, but our aim with the “AI images” filter is to filter out as much AI-generated content as possible.
I run Firefox on Linux Mint with uBlockOrigin and uMatrix addons (with modified settings) so I can’t speak to the universality of my results, but it seems like DDG is pretty loose with how it categorizes and displays info.
With AI images set to hide on first search for “morse code chart” I get the following: Hide
Toggling the AI image setting to show instantly changes the results and displays these: Show (instant)
Without additional changes, just clicking the search button again slightly changes the results: show (re-search)
Toggling the AI image setting back to hide again instantly changes the results to: Hide (instant)
Re-running the search as is returns the same results as #1.
I’ve also previously had horrible luck getting the date filters to work when trying to use a bookmarklet style shortcut to add the dates as parameters in the address bar (they’re just completely ignored when a search is run that way for me), and as of ~2 days ago the date range just didn’t seem to work at all. I was trying to find a human authored post/article about the difference between opossums and possums and using a date range of 1950–2015 was still ONLY returning results post-2023 and they were all wordy slop.
In my experience (currently my only mobile browser) it will remember last setting, prefer no ai if unknown userbase preference and if there’s a known userbase preference it will do either yours or userbase depending on settings and version. Search assist (ai search summary) is on by default but will not force a generated answer. All of these settings have been easy and intuitive for me to toggle, though it is chromium based. I have seen better filtering and results on some searches on ddg than google, but that bar is so low bing can sometimes clear it.
Most important error is that you have AI results set to show instead of hide.
It is a symptom of how slop is overwhelming actual results, because regular sites that use AI to ‘save costs’ will just perpetuate the slop and when 99% of results are slop then it doesn’t matter what your settings are.
This would still show up even if it was set to hide though right? This is an image result on a third party site. Imo its worse because theres no disclosure that its even AI
DDG’s description of that feature:
I run Firefox on Linux Mint with uBlockOrigin and uMatrix addons (with modified settings) so I can’t speak to the universality of my results, but it seems like DDG is pretty loose with how it categorizes and displays info.
With AI images set to hide on first search for “morse code chart” I get the following: Hide
Toggling the AI image setting to show instantly changes the results and displays these: Show (instant)
Without additional changes, just clicking the search button again slightly changes the results: show (re-search)
Toggling the AI image setting back to hide again instantly changes the results to: Hide (instant)
Re-running the search as is returns the same results as #1.
I’ve also previously had horrible luck getting the date filters to work when trying to use a bookmarklet style shortcut to add the dates as parameters in the address bar (they’re just completely ignored when a search is run that way for me), and as of ~2 days ago the date range just didn’t seem to work at all. I was trying to find a human authored post/article about the difference between opossums and possums and using a date range of 1950–2015 was still ONLY returning results post-2023 and they were all wordy slop.
huh? these are image results on duckduckgo, why wouldn’t the duckduckgo “hide ai images” option work?
How does duckduckgo flawlessly know what images are ai and not?
They rely on people reporting slop and denylist those sites.
They use an AI for that of course!
Unfortunately it still shows, even when hiding AI. And I’m searching over the noai DDG Version
What’s the default?
I don’t know offhand but I strongly suspect everything related to AI is defaulted to on/show.
In my experience (currently my only mobile browser) it will remember last setting, prefer no ai if unknown userbase preference and if there’s a known userbase preference it will do either yours or userbase depending on settings and version. Search assist (ai search summary) is on by default but will not force a generated answer. All of these settings have been easy and intuitive for me to toggle, though it is chromium based. I have seen better filtering and results on some searches on ddg than google, but that bar is so low bing can sometimes clear it.