2mo ago

AI scammers are killing all my hobbies

www.zdnet.com AI scams have infiltrated the knitting and crochet world - why it matters for everyone

Using AI, scammers are creating frustrating - and expensive - problems for makers. Here's how to spot AI-generated patterns - and why anyone who relies on downloaded instructions should pay attention.

Like most people, I use the internet to look for inspiration for my hobbies, like cooking, baking, crochet, lettering etc. AI scammers and AI slop are killing my enthusiasm though. I'm using too much time and energy to sift though all the crap in order to find some gems.

What I need is some place to collect and curate trustworthy websites and do a websearch in those sites instead of the whole web whenever I need a recipe or are looking for my next fiber project. Does anybody have ideas or tips how to pull that of?

33 comments

You can install this blacklist with either uBlockOrigin or uBlacklist. It's still being updated:
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
uBlockOrigin & uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites (1000+) that contain AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines (Google Search, DuckDuckGo, and Bing) with uBlock Origin or uBlacklist.
Also works on mobile (iOS, iPadOS, Android) via uBlacklist, as well as pihole/adguard (via Hosts file)
- Thanks! So thankful that I can count on the open source sommunity for tools like this!
- So cool! Thank you!

I've chosen an outrageous option and just started buying books from used book stores, scanning library books and downloading some to my jellyfin.
If I can't trust the internet I'm just getting off it.
If I couldn't trust a restaurant to not give me food poisoning I'd stop going.
- That is not so outragious, actually! My mother was also a crafty type and I inherited a ton of books and copies when she died. They are patiently waiting somewhere in my hobby room, since it is so easy to search on the net. Since every decade is becoming trendy again at a certain point in time, this is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered. I mean, I have a whole series of recipe booklets and crochet patterns from the 70s!
  
  I have learned to appreciate a good index. You can literally tell the good books from the bad ones by how useful the index is I swear.
  Also when I want to be able to search them as long it's scanned right and I've got a digital copy I can do Ctrl+F.
  Its annoying cause I do have to know I have what I'm looking for and what book it might be in but that's why we have brains I guess.
  I have an insane book from the 1950s for how to properly cater and set every possible meal time from summer tea to like fall bonfires but its less about recipes and more about presentation.
- This. I've started my collection buying books at estate sales. Dirt cheap and likely from an era where you probably had to be credible to publish something in a bound volume on actual paper.
  
  There's gotta be a series about this. Only "The Old Ones" that can operate something that's not an iDevice, the only ones left who can handwrite and don't use AI for every question they ever had. The only ones with books because everyone else threw them out and burned them. Would be interesting but we are living it right now so maybe no need.

Sorry, no specific tips. Maybe there's a browser plug-in that makes it easy to whitelist websites in a search? I would pay for a search engine where actual human people regularly vet the websites included in it for factual information and unlabeled AI use.
- Would Kagi do something like that, ie flag/filter AI slop?
  
  I hadn't looked into Kagi, as I only learned about it after I had started using Ecosia.
  I just glanced through the info page, they let you customize your search results, and it seems like they do some curation of the results too. But they are also getting in on the AI search band wagon.

The web is done. You have to go outside now. "Family recipes" will come back

Honestly I’m buying up as many art reference books as I can get my hands on. Find a lot of them in second hand stores. Lots based on video games, movies or technical references like planes or ships.

I have two very different suggestions.
Firefox has an addon called uBlacklist it allows you to delete bad sites from your searches. Not sure if any other browsers have something like this.
Your local Public Library is a great, free, resource. Not just for the materials that you can borrow, but may have groups or activities that meet there.

Is it time to bring an old-school, Yahoo!-style directory back?
- Webrings, baby
  
  Damn, I had to rummage through some dusty corner of my brain to remember “Webrings”. Nice one. I wonder if they could work as a federated service…

You can setup your adblocker to block search results from websites you blacklist with a little bit of work and an understanding of CSS selectors. I cooked up a custom extension to give me a button on each search result to add it to the list.
I still get countless garbage results though and haven’t added to the list in a few months. The internet will just be partially broken until there’s a way to reliably index ai slop sites.

I've seen this thing some time ago, but never got to testing https://lemmy.world/post/20667463

You can probably manipulate search results by including (site:example.com OR site:example 2.com) or excluding (-example.com -example2.com) websites.

It seems like the solution is only using trusted sources like bloggers and YouTubers that you follow.
- The problem is finding them and hoping they don't sell out.

I never had an account but I’d peruse Pinterest for crafting etc ideas. Meow most of them are fake, click bait bs trying to lead you to paid content.
- I stopped using Pinterest ages ago, when they started adding ads. Nowadays its ony ads and AI slop there.

Stop looking for inspiration and finish one project for once for fucks sake

Learn how to tell fact from fiction and reality-test everything you see. Phone a friend

33 comments