Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.
↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge
I’m a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out!
Have been experimentally replacing browsers with vivaldi and search engines with noai.duckduckgo.com on all my family’s devices.
Has been going fairly well, as they no longer get dark patterned into relying on fake intelligence’s output.
I had no idea this was a thing, I have DDG set as my start page on Librewolf and I use DDG’s settings “cloud save” feature to sync my settings for the search engine, removing all the “AI” options. This URL seems like a much simpler solution, kudos to DDG for providing it! Though they could do better at promoting the feature…
From what I gather, it *does* have one feature powered by “ai” enabled by default, namely the option called “Hide AI-Generated Images”.
Left google services altogether. Syncthing for device sync and backup, Brave and Brave Search for browsing, and good’ol off line applications like libreoffice for task, mailcow for email… hell, I still use RSS (using RSS Guard) to follow sites that I like.
And google isn’t really putting any effort to lure users like me back to their enshitted hole. The enshitification of google services are now complete, the decay is now irreversible. From the google that I used and loved back in 2000 that added real value to people’s life to a total useless piece of junk today damaging society.
Why have real people to write fake news and profit out of it “because proper grooming is impossible” non-sense they have been giving as excuse for a decades? Let’s have shit tech megacorps just skip the middle man.
Any good replacement for maps?
At the moment my go-to is comaps. While it is adequate, it doesn’t quite match google’s maps yet.
Contributing to openstreetmaps via comaps can be great fun, though.
Unfortunately, this one I don’t have.
Using Brave is contributing to the “AI” garbage, not minimizing it(1). The browser is also a crypto scam disguised as a browser(2). They claim to be the “most private browser” yet they show you more ads than any other browser and they are more directly targeted than ads in other browsers(3). They hide the fact that they install third party software on your PC without your consent(4).
(1) https://www.ghacks.net/2025/09/30/ask-brave-new-ai-powered-search-feature-launches-on-brave-search
(2) https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
(3) https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser
(4) https://www.xda-developers.com/brave-browser-installs-vpn-windows
The only people who should be using Brave are Brendan Eich himself and like-minded misogynistic, bigoted cryptobros huffing the “AI” hype. It’s a garbage browser from a piece of shit excuse for a human being and it’s actively harmful to the tech community at large.
Morgan,
Yes, it is true, but they are very good at marketing.
Brave as you mentioned is a shell around crypto. Opera (GX) is not much better. Duck Duck Go is okay, but it is basically “incognito” Bing. And most others are similar.
Even now, writing this from Firefox, I know they had to compromise a lot to stay afloat.
What was the saying? If you are not paying for it, you are the product.
I … have a lot to say about this… But for obvious reasons I cannot.
Though I would say some of the blame (or most?) goes to publishers. They have been toying with click bait titles, were it is very difficult to understand the context from neither the article title, or the small snippet.
Things like this were common. So, AI is just going to amplify this (might even make it less bad)
I’m inclined to agree with you and say “enough is enough with clickbait”. I’m even using DeArrow on Firefox to cope with clickbait. But then again, this is Google.
cevvalkoala,
I fear, unfortunately we have just started going down that path.
sukru,
Oh how much I despise clickbait. Humans have been “perfecting” it long before AI. Mrbeast and sssniper did away with custom creative thumbnails and quite literally auto-generated thumbnails of generic stock photos of themself gawking at everything…. It reminds me of the way that NFT images are often generated using hundreds of overlay permutations. Ugh, I find the whole thing so uncreative and spammy…. yet killing creative artists in favor of this permutation slop became a winning formula. Low effort click bait polluted youtube’s home page for what seems like a decade before they finally decided to do something about youtube’s own role in popularizing the same channels over and over again to no end.
There’s no doubt that AI will identify what works and what doesn’t work. AI really can be trained to do great things, but I think there’s an unfortunate lesson here for many of us, which is that trash works. AI didn’t cause this, but it can optimize it. Calling it an amplifier is fitting.
Alfman,
“You get what you measure”
Once the metrics for journalism were broken, we were set on a path with almost no avenue for return.
What makes money is not spending time writing in depth articles, being insightful, or even being the first to break a story.
But as all of us have realized it is making a “clickbait” headline and burying information so that we can sell more ads.
And the content? It is unfortunately, just a vehicle to sell more of those ads.
News are propaganda anyway. You don’t realise because propaganda works.
Yes, the news about the morning pile-up on a nearby highway was dripping with propaganda.
Saying all news is propaganda is a bit silly, no?