[HN Gopher] AI uBlock Blacklist
___________________________________________________________________
AI uBlock Blacklist
Author : rdmuser
Score : 202 points
Date : 2026-02-21 08:10 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rdmuser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hasn't been updated in 5 months
| rdmuser wrote:
| 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.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| 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"
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
|
| He's not complaining that widgets for his favorite social
| network site is getting blocked, he's complaining that
| anything vaguely related to social networks are getting
| banned. Some of the sites on that list are stuff like
| chatgpt.com, which might be AI related, but clearly doesn't
| fit the criteria of "AI generated content, for the purposes
| of cleaning image search engines".
| hogwasher wrote:
| 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
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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...
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| 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.
| rdmuser wrote:
| 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.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| 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.
| flkiwi wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Sam, and when you ask them a deeper question about it on a
| call they usually have no idea. It's making people very
| lazy.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Yeah I hate it when people do that and I always call them
| out on it.
|
| Unfortunately our company is trying to be "AI First" so
| they'll just point to that and continue their bullshit.
|
| Our company literally promotes AI slop over personally made
| content even if it's mediocre crap. All they care about is
| rising usage numbers of things like copilot in office.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I have a similar coworker, but he's not great at prompting,
| so 10% of the time the AI version of himself makes
| confident assertions that he did not intend and are clearly
| not true. Genuinely no idea what I'm supposed to do about
| it.
| flkiwi wrote:
| Exactly right. He's good at what he does, except
| communicating, and people are beginning to associate him
| with AI slop they don't have time to read rather than the
| excellent work he does for them.
| ploum wrote:
| "One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally
| almost illiterate."
|
| I cannot imagine what it means. To me it reads like "I know
| someone who can run very fast but has no legs."
| vogu66 wrote:
| Capable doesn't mean capable of office work though, I
| could see someone with a language disorder doing
| electronics and have trouble with words, not numbers. Or
| someone who has trouble with written words specifically
| doing most of their learning with classes and videos.
| flkiwi wrote:
| Exactly right. The individual in question produces
| excellent deliverables within their space. They, the
| coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very
| good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a
| way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks
| almost none of your language but can understand it and
| produce good work.
| rererereferred wrote:
| I mean, the reason we use grammarly is because we recognize we
| have a skill issue.
| jofzar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's not a single group who's ever been told skill issue
| that didn't complain
| tclancy wrote:
| Sure, but there also plenty of times "get gud!" is used for
| gate keeping. Life is on a continuum, man.
| duskdozer wrote:
| If you don't know English and you want to write English anyway,
| please just use a machine translator.
| GaggiX wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ...what? no? why?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| And the machine translator is using AI to translate the text
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Right, makes sense for Danes, or other population where
| English knowledge is basically ubiquitous. But I'm think it
| might look differently in other places, if the choice is
| between "Badly translated but I can understand 95% of it"
| and "In a language I don't understand at all, maybe 1% I
| could figure out", then the choice might be a bit
| different.
| ploum wrote:
| nope, let the user does the translation, with his own
| choice of tool and being thus perfectly aware of the
| shortcomings.
|
| I know that some people translate my French posts to read
| them. That's really cool. But I would never post
| something I didn't write myself (but I use spellcheking
| tools. I even sometimes disagree with them)
| runarberg wrote:
| There are levels to things. In a professional context
| (including product design and documentation/instructions)
| don't use machine translation[+].
|
| For your personal hobby site or for general online
| communication, you probably shouldn't use machine
| translation, but it is probably useful if have B1 language
| skills and are checking up on your grammar, vocabulary,
| etc. As for using LLMs to help you write, I certainly
| prefer people use the traditional models over LLMs, as the
| traditional models still require you to think and forces
| you to actually learn more about the output language.
|
| For reading somebody else's content in a language you don't
| understand, machine translation is fine up to a point, as
| long as you are aware that it may not be accurate.
|
| ---
|
| + In fact I personally I think EU should mandate translator
| qualification, and probably would have only 20 years ago
| when consumer protection was still a thing they pretended
| to care about.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| afcool83 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This one?
|
| https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-
| _Overclocke...
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I think that's the one. I was a bit off on the timing, it's
| not 20 yet. Great read either way.
|
| From the story:
|
| "Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying,
| spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which
| could act more human, and since their failures invoked a
| human judgement about whether their material were
| convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests
| from which they could learn. From there came the first
| machine-intelligence algorithms, and then my kind."
| alansaber wrote:
| 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.
| Dwedit wrote:
| What happens if a legitimate site (forums, wiki, etc) gets mass-
| spammed with slop?
| harladsinsteden wrote:
| I ceases to be legitimate.
| firebot wrote:
| Firefox already feeling more responsive.
| metalman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| At least we're not yet in the phase where we have a whitelist for
| the internet.
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| We were close but the app dominance declined.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| 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.
| dimava wrote:
| Also check the https://botblock.ai/ , AI extension to detect AI
| replies on twitter
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| quiet35 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| The server is and has been clean the whole time. I don't
| even run WordPress or anything similar on that server that
| would be a common hacking target. If it was hacked, I'm
| pretty sure Google Safe Browsing would be the first to flag
| the site, not some random PiHole list.
| jorvi wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> And get all your friends to switch to Adguard extension
| and Adguard Home (Pi Hole alternative) as blockers.
|
| Nice of you to slip this "easy" step into your advice. Give
| me a break!
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| in that case they should just contribute to one of the
| existing, more established lists. We don't need n+1
| standards...
| Drupon wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| Drupon wrote:
| Yeah that's what the people love to say on the Steam forums
| when they've gotten busted in one of its many ban waves.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| > but this is not how a public blacklist should be maintained.
|
| Cry about it.
|
| There's nothing in that repo that even pretends to be flawless,
| impartial or anything else. The sheer amount of mental denial
| of service that having to deal with SEO slopshitters opening
| issues saying that they promise their substack is totally
| written by hand makes this an impossible task.
|
| Ban first, ask questions later. If you find that some rules are
| unfair, edit them yourself, for your personal usage.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I find it a bit ironic that this site regularly talks about
| banning whole countries and IP ranges on our servers, then
| acts shocked when users do the same. The fact that somebody
| went to the effort to create and share this shows how poorly
| the public sees the web.
|
| The reality we face is "Check your AdBlocker" is the new
| "Check your spam folder" and we should adjust accordingly.
| DrammBA wrote:
| You forgot:
|
| > A _personal_ list for uBlock Origin
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| If the website is not AI slop, presumably they would remove it
| from the list.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Not any more it seems: https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-
| blacklist/commit/7ebaa7...
| dhayabaran wrote:
| The false positive problem gets worse over time too. Domains get
| sold, sites pivot, old content gets removed. A blocklist with no
| removal process and a "cry about it" attitude in the FAQ is
| basically a one-way reputational blackhole. At minimum it needs
| an expiry or re-review mechanism. Even browser safe browsing
| lists re-check URLs periodically.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Also need a rule that filters out HN submissions from that Simon
| Wilson guy.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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.
| eclipticplane wrote:
| His articles are _about_ AI though, not AI slop?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| ramon156 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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- wrote:
| Haha, that's a neat idea. Thanks for sharing.
|
| https://tropes.fyi/aidr/b184cf3a
|
| https://tropes.fyi/aidr/9b132f92
| semiinfinitely wrote:
| Tragic twist: repo was entirely AI generated
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| media.tenor.com/oW5zO_6gu5gAAAAi/theomegaoof-emoji.gif
| filldorns wrote:
| Come on guys, 2026 and you still using "blacklist". Why not
| BlockList?
| charonn0 wrote:
| Because changing blacklist to blocklist, master to main, etc.
| is a meaningless act of virtue signalling.
| Thanemate wrote:
| 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_rem
| ov...
| Symbiote wrote:
| GitHub changed the default branch name from master to main.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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).
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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.
| greyman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I dont think this is a sign of the times or the future. I think
| its just your own personal browsing habits.
| Grom_PE wrote:
| I feel that blocking, substituting, and even inserting user-
| defined resources for a website must be a native browser
| feature.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| greyman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lkm0 wrote:
| Why is apnews.com on the list?
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| 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
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