General Ludd's Guide to Draining the Bot Slop From Your Device

[osteophage]

General Ludd's Guide to Draining the Bot Slop From Your Device is a beginner-friendly guide to removing generative bot features from your search results, your browser, and your operating system. Let me know if you have any feedback for changes or additions.

Comments

[duskpeterson]

Bless you for this.

"Try Another Search Engine"

Another one is Startpage. It's privacy-oriented but has an arrangement with Google to use its search results. No AI summaries in the search results. You can block post-ChatGPT-launch results in the same way that you do at Google, through a date-limited search: https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?q=before%3A2022-11-30&cat=web

[osteophage]

Thank you.

I have reservations about Startpage given that it's currently promoting a chatbot app, but I can add it to the list for completion's sake.

[duskpeterson]

Yeah, I noticed that. But you mentioned Google, and I figured this is a good alternative for folks who want Google results, but without AI summaries. Startpage also claims that they don't use users' data to train AI (for the simple reason that they don't save users' data).

[osteophage]

Makes sense. I've added it to the guide.

[duskpeterson]

:)

[zavodilaterrarium]

I probably won’t make any big changes in what I use, but this is a good personal reminder to check my settings again to make sure I got rid of all the annoying stuff, thank you ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪

[osteophage]

Thanks for reading!

[biteshelter]

Thanks for this. I've added that blocklist and switched to the NoAI DDG subdomain.

I've been using Arkenfox for general security and privacy in Firefox with this preferences list to disable AI features. I'm not sure how it compares to the newer Just the Browser, though.

(The hammers numbering the sections is a nice touch.)

[osteophage]

Thanks. Coming up with little stylistic details like that is one of the fun parts. :)

So is Arkenfox a template to use in combination with base Firefox? I'm not sure I understand how that works.

[biteshelter]

Arkenfox is a template configuration file, the same file you edit in about:config, plus some recommended extensions. It comes with a script for appending another configuration file to load into Firefox. The preferences list is a configuration file with the same settings listed in the posts about using about:config to disable AI features.

[osteophage]

Ah, got it. Thanks for explaining!