You Can Use DuckDuckGo to Remove AI Images From Your Search Results
When I search for an image online, I’m usually looking for either a link or the exact, copyright-free material that I can add to a project before publishing or presenting it. AI-generated images don’t help me with either of those. And if I do need an AI-generated image, it’s easy to generate one myself using a custom query . So I can’t imagine a situation where I’d want to see AI-generated images in my search results. Luckily, DuckDuckGo seems to agree with me .
The privacy-focused search engine and browser company recently announced a new feature for its Images tab that lets you hide AI-generated images by default. While there are ways to hide AI in Google search results , without installing extensions, you’ll have to use them every time you search. With DuckDuckGo, it’s simple: set it and forget it.
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Simply visit the DuckDuckGo website, type in your search query, click the Images tab, then in the settings panel below the search bar, click AI-generated images and select Hide from the drop-down menu. DuckDuckGo will remember your settings for all future searches. You can also click the menu in the top right corner, select Settings under Search and enable the Hide AI-generated images option. Or, you can simply start your search from noai.duckduckgo.com .
The company warns that its “list of blocked results is not exhaustive,” so a few AI-generated results may slip through, but I immediately noticed a significant difference in my attempts. When searching for tabby kittens, I was able to eliminate as many as four or five AI-generated images from the first page of results, including several with odd, cartoonish proportions that probably wouldn’t have helped me if I’d just wanted to know what a baby tabby cat looked like. It wasn’t as noticeable as the “baby peacock” example DuckDuckGo included in its ad, but it was a nice confirmation that what I was seeing was probably real.
DuckDuckGo says its blocklist for hiding AI-generated images is based on open-source work, including the massive AI blocklist uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist . This list is hand-curated and covers over 1,000 sites known to host AI-generated content. While it doesn’t cover everything, it’s a great start. It’s also useful because it works even if the image doesn’t necessarily have an AI watermark.
While the presence of a built-in AI blocklist makes DuckDuckGo appealing to skeptics , it’s worth noting that DuckDuckGo isn’t necessarily anti-AI, and in fact, offers several AI-powered tools of its own . However, when announcing the new image filtering feature, DuckDuckGo said it aims to make its AI experiments “private, useful, and optional.”