DuckDuckGo, the very famous privacy web browser competitor to Google, has just announced that they are blocking AI images in search. Now, there's a bunch of interesting things about this and make this announcement. You're actually able to opt in or opt out. And there is some precedent for why this has happened, and they have been sort of making fun of Google in the way that they have announced this essentially.
So this is a search engine that has been famous for privacy for a long time. People love DuckDuckGo. It's a great competitor to Google. Based off of the blind tests, I've done the results are pretty great in comparison to Google.
So I think this is an interesting move. But beyond just like, oh, wow, look, they've blocked some images. I think this is going to have some huge implications for what everybody is doing in image search, text, video, audio, a lot of different areas. So we're going to get into all of that today.
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So I think the reason, like setting kind of going back a little bit and sending the present for why this is happening, Google got a lot of flack back in October of last year. Someone did a search and I mean, this applies to like a lot of different things, but specifically someone did a search for baby peacocks and they found in a search for baby peacocks of the top results. There was three of them that were or two of them that were not a generated and there was like seven of them that were eight of them that were a generate. So the top 10 to were real and eight were a generated, which obviously is pretty insane and kind of concerning when you start thinking about education, a lot of things you're like, what the heck is a baby peacock look like?
Now, no, people are seeing this fake AI generated stuff and I think this applies to a lot of different things, right? So Google got a lot of flack, which is the only reason I bring up this whole peacock example is because it's kind of funny when DuckDuckGo made a big announcement. They were over on X tweet about it. And in their example, like the example that they shared was the key word baby peacock.
They didn't specifically call it Google, but basically they called it Google. So what's interesting here, this is their exact tweet. They said a new setting which is hide AI generated images and DuckDuckGo are 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 and you like or if you want any at all. Essentially what it is when you're doing a search, you have a toggle, you can drop down, which is show AI images or hide AI images. It will completely hide them. How are they doing this?
What does this mean in the future? This is what I thought was interesting. They said the filter relies on manually curated open source block lists, including the quote unquote nuclear list provided by UBLOCK origin and UBLOCK list huge AI block list. So while it's not going to actually catch 100% of AI generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI generated images that you see.
What's interesting here is they haven't generated specifically like a they haven't gone through and actually generated a technology that does this, which I found pretty interesting. They're relying on someone else that has created these block lists with the families of images, which means that new stuff could get through and isn't going to get shown. But I think basically how this works is people have been scraping the internet. They probably relied on a lot of manual humans to go and flag images.
And then on top of humans flag images, they trained probably trained models to be able to understand that. And then they went through and make this giant database of every single image that is AI generated, which is super, super useful for a company like go to add. Now, in the future, I think Dr. Go is going to build something a little bit more robust, probably in house, maybe working with some open source libraries or tools like this.
But at the end of the day, I think they can't just rely on a third party company to do this as it's obviously not super reliable. Like if I make a brand new AI generated image of Trump with a machine gun on top of the lighthouse and make some fake news website about how Trump turns into a crazy terrorist. And I get that thing to, you know, for all the memes, it gets SEO to the top of images. When you search for Trump, that's the first thing that shows up and people are like, Oh my gosh, is this real?
Right? So like it could get through very easily. And so I think this isn't like an end all be all, but I think it does have a huge list of, you know, known fake AI generated images and hopefully we train on more. So it should be kind of good.
But definitely not perfect. So just putting that out there. A couple interesting things about using this tool from Dr. Go.
So you can like when you do a search, you can go and toggle the filter off of all the images. But they also have on basically like a URL, which is no AI, no AI dot dot dot dot com. So if you go to no AI dot dot com and do any searches, it's automatically by default turning off all of the states. Now, this is image generation.
The reason why I want to the story today is because I think there's way bigger implications than just image generation. First of all, this is fantastic. I'm actually kind of excited about this. I think it's going to be quite useful.
But I think when you start looking at this for for essentially what we could do with text, you know, blogs and stuff, Google has actually been doing a, I think probably a decent job of trying to find websites that are a generated. I hear a lot of people saying that Google search is full of AI slot blog posts and my experience with this in my background, which I'm sure some people hate me or whatever or get mad at this. But when I was doing my last startup, which was self-pause is before I should be ever came out, I discovered an AI generating tool. I was just for and I was generating, I think I've done over 3000 articles for that website, my website, self-pause and had them all posted.
They're just like every question you could ever possibly think of around, you know, SEO around affirmations and meditation, that kind of stuff and I have thousands of articles. Now, inevitably what happened was a manual review came through. So some person reported my blog post and back then I was trying to make them really good. This was like, guys, this is before Chachi PT.
So you got to get me a little slack. I thought I invented the greatest thing. I was paying like people to go write these articles and generate them. You can only do like a couple sentences at a time.
And so anyways, I had this whole flow where I didn't forget last questions and images and backlinks and all this crazy stuff. I thought I was a genius. But I mean, inevitably, it's probably low quality content, especially because this is like an old old version of Chachi PT before Chachi PT launch. So it's like wasn't even, you know, it's like the oldest responses of hallucination that you could get.
But in any case, at some point, after Chachi PT came out and probably a year later, I was getting, you know, thousands and thousands of web clicks a day from Google. And at some point, someone manually reported the site and it got flagged and shut off. And that site hasn't really recovered in the Google search results. I haven't done much of salvage because I've been working on my company, AI box, I haven't really been, you know, I haven't done anything really with self-pause since then.
However, it was an interesting point to me that Google is looking like they're trying to penalize some of these AI search results with their low quality and they'll essentially just pull the website out of the search results if it has all that quote unquote spam or whatever you want to call it. So it's interesting to me, Dr. Go is kind of doing this thing where you can toggle on and off images, Google inevitably is kind of blacklisted. But Google's blacklist was a manual review.
So like if you just use a few here and there, you're using AI to help augment, you know, what you're writing or probably if you're just more clever than however, you know, I did that and you have a newer version of Chachi PT and you're getting articles rewritten when new models come out, get better results. I think that there's probably, you know, millions and millions of sites that are not getting penalized that are still showing up. So it is kind of a cat-a-mouse game. It is kind of tricky.
And I think maybe instead of, you know, I think when you start thinking about this, like, yes, it's cool that you can just turn off AI generated images in Dr. Go, but you don't want to by default never see a generate image because it's plenty of viral ones with blog posts. I think it's probably a little bit different except that a blog post was it. It's basically like a static Chachi PT response.
So I guess it's not necessarily that it's like an AI generated blog post is bad because it's just the same result that Chachi PT would give you. Maybe someone's not using Chachi PT this one. Use Google for whatever reason. So they get that the only downside to the blog post is when Chachi PT gets an update, the response gets better theoretically and it, you know, response better and it's more.
And then these things get more and more intelligent, you know, with the latest Grog 4 is now as smart as a PhD in like every area. And so I think the blog posts, honestly, I think are just an outdated model of consuming information when Chachi PT can change. Now, are there places for blog posts like, I think, is this still useful medium? Yes, I think when you're working on something in your own home and you're taking screenshots of your workflow and what you're doing and like, you can imagine these things being very useful and case study on something you've done that Chachi PT has never learned.
You're breaking a piece of news or sharing a piece of information that no one else has. Yes, I think it was a great place for blog post then. But if you're just answering frequently asked questions about a topic that there's like 10 other websites, blog posts probably aren't very useful and you could probably get that same information from Chachi PT. So like when you go to blogs versus when you go to Chachi PT, inevitably, blogs are all going to get sucked into Chachi PT.
If you use a tool like perplex, it's going to go do their research and validate the information. So I think people still write keep writing blogs and sharing that information, but if you use a tool like perplex, you don't really need it. So yeah, anyways, it's just a fascinating time with AI to decide what level. And the reason why this question is important is because we're doing this with images right now, but the next step will be video.
And then of course, we have audio and we've kind of already went through this with its own version of text. I think video may be somewhat similar to image, but at the same time, like there's viral AI generated images that are, you know, super funny memes that somebody made. You don't want to just like never see those anyway, right? So it's like you can't just like block, like, blacklist those all from the internet forever because there's funny, interesting uses or reasons why someone might generate an image.
Anyways, it is a very interesting time with content creation and with just everything on the internet. I think at the end of the day, it would be cool to have a complete toggle on your browser in Chrome or anywhere else. It just completely blocks all AI generated stuff. I think a lot of people would like that.
But maybe that there's something somewhere in the middle a little bit more, which is like block, like most AI generated things unless it's like super, super popular. A lot of people are talking about it. Right. Like, I don't know, this is going to be kind of interesting to see where it all lands on this.
But definitely a question that these big browsers and search engines are going to grapple with, especially with Dr. Go taking the lead here. You know, Google's got to be thinking about it and a lot of these guys are going to be thinking about it because nobody wants one of their competitors to come up with a feature that seems more useful and draws any of their users away. So it should be interesting to see where all of this goes.
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