We made it our mission to prevent the web from becoming useless and a harmful space. That’s why today, Kagi Search introduces the first community-driven system to detect and downrank deceptive AI…
“We believe AI slop is an existential threat to an internet that should belong to humans. This is the first step towards our ultimate goal: to kill AI slop so you never see it again.”
This initiative will give you even greater control over what you see online, elevating high-value, trustworthy information above misinformation, news websites, false narratives, and content farms. We’ll improve the system by learning from your feedback and building more automated elements.
All Kagi Search users can now flag low-quality AI content (“AI slop”) in web, image, and video search results. We will verify these reports using our own signals. If a domain primarily publishes AI-generated content, we will downrank it in Kagi Search and mark it as AI slop. If a page is AI-generated but the domain is mixed (not mostly AI), we will flag the page as AI-generated but will not downrank it.
For media results, images and videos confirmed as AI-generated, they will be labelled as such and automatically downranked on the results page. Users can also choose to filter out AI-generated media entirely.
The powerful duo: SlopStop and Small Web
AI is evolving so quickly that it is increasingly complex to detect, but not impossible. Not all AI-generated content is harmful and misleading, but if a domain is in the business of only disseminating AI content, we consider it slop.
In parallel to fighting AI-generated slop, we are implementing solutions for whitelisting and amplifying verified human creators online through our Small Web initiative. Every piece of AI slop we flag makes authentic human content more discoverable. We want to prioritize creators who make the internet truly valuable, no matter the tools they use.
The Small Web represents everything AI slop threatens: authentic human voices, genuine creativity, and content created for passion rather than profit. Together, SlopStop and the Small Web create a powerful defense against the commercialization and artificial pollution of the internet.
Building the largest AI slop dataset to fight LLM hallucinations
SlopStop within our search is a step to an enhanced, trustworthy experience across the Kagi ecosystem. As a result of this initiative, we aim to build the largest dataset of AI-slop domains on the web, using in-house-built detection and a carefully curated community reporting system. In essence, we are using AI to destroy AI slop.
We’ll use this dataset to build our own AI content detection tech, which will be used across our products as additional defense against AI-generated hallucinations, false claims, and misinformation, which we know now account for 30-41% of the fail response rate in most other chatbots.
Access to the database will be shared soon, you can express interest here if you’d like to receive updates.
Join the fight: protect the quality of your search
The battle for internet authenticity can’t be won without your support. We are starting with this crowdsourced effort to help us learn and develop the final, automated solution. Every piece of harmful AI-generated content you identify helps create a better, more trustworthy search experience for everyone.
See something that qualifies as AI generated? Here’s how to flag it:
- Click the shield icon next to any search result
- Select “Report as AI-generated”
- Our review team takes it from there
To learn more about how SlopStop works, view our documentation. As usual, we rely heavily on user input for all our products, so if you have feedback or suggestions, share them in our forums.
Read the original article
Comments
This is so, so exciting. I hope HN takes inspiration and adds a similar flag. :)
By postalcoder 2025-11-141:212 reply I just requested access to the database @freediver so hopefully it should be integrated into https://hcker.news soon.
I appreciate Kagi's community-driven approach. The open Small Web list[0] is invaluable. Applying a smallweb filter[1] on HN brings a breath of fresh air to the frontpage.
By chemotaxis 2025-11-141:502 reply I like the effort, but it's super restrictive. They exclude all of Substack on principle (but weirdly, allow blogspot.com and wordpress.com). They exclude anything that isn't a blog. And they exclude blogs that aren't updated often enough.
The end result is that there's a lot of "small web" stuff that doesn't show up. Looking at my bookmarks, I think 90% of them are in the "small web" category in spirit, but maybe 10% have any chance of appearing on the Kagi list.
Substack is definitely outside my idea of what “the small web” means (I realise this isn’t well defined and will mean different things to different people, though).
It’s a platform and social network of sorts, rather than a neutral hosting provider and it’s too often used in a way that’s inauthentically commercial IMO.
By chemotaxis 2025-11-147:521 reply Note that this is the admission policy for a per-blog whitelist - we're not talking about including *.substack.com as a "good" domain, just allowing someone to propose the inclusion of hacker-bob.substack.com.
And the policy already allows wordpress.com or blogspot.com (the latter is probably mostly spam nowadays, with a few holdouts who have been using it for 20 years). Also note that Small Web allows YouTube channels under 400k subscribers (!). So it's really not that clean-cut.
By nextaccountic 2025-11-148:59 > And the policy already allows wordpress.com or blogspot.com (the latter is probably mostly spam nowadays, with a few holdouts who have been using it for 20 years).
Do you mean the entire .wordpress.com and .blogspot.com are allowed as per the grandparent comment implies, or just individual blogs may or may no be allowed, exactly like substack?
By immibis 2025-11-149:35 The social network seems relevant to me. It feels like people are posting for clout, trying to get to as many inboxes as possible, so they post a lot of marketing slop, just like on LinkedIn.
By postalcoder 2025-11-142:021 reply I understand the substack exclusion. The paywall is not user friendly.
If you don't mind, it'd be cool to take a look at your bookmark domains so that I could potentially augment the filter on my site. If you're interested, my email is in bio.
By chemotaxis 2025-11-148:011 reply There's no paywall on Substack, except for actual paid-only blogs. You might be thinking Medium.
By bayindirh 2025-11-1414:12 Substack has a very disconcerting reading experience.
I generally close the tab when the inevitable "Subscribe for the newsletter. Almost half of the world has subscribed, c'mon!" overlay appears.
I just want to read the thing, not to fill my inbox with newsletters from various blogs. We have RSS for that!
By thefringthing 2025-11-1415:581 reply Is there a simple way to turn a set of hcker.news feed settings into an RSS feed?
By postalcoder 2025-11-1416:16 Not yet. I've gotten a bunch of requests for it but I haven't scoped it out yet. Could you send me an email? It'll be helpful to have your input.
By jacquesm 2025-11-1322:13 Indeed.
By dvfjsdhgfv 2025-11-1321:589 reply So we have two universes. One is pushing generated content up our throats - from social media to operating systems - and another universe where people actively decide not to have anything to do with it.
I wonder where the obstinacy on the part of certain CEOs come from. It's clear that although such content does have its fans (mostly grouped in communities), people at large just hate arificially-generated content. We had our moment, it was fun, it is no more, but these guys seem obsessed in promoting it.
There is a huge audience for AI-generated content on YouTube, though admittedly many of them are oblivious to the fact that they are watching AI-generated content.
Here are several examples of videos with 1 million views that people don't seem to realize are AI-generated:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxvTjrsNtxA
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDnMpuSYic
These videos do have some editing which I believe was done by human editors, but the scripts are written by GPT, the assets are all AI-generated illustrations, and the voice is AI-generated. (The fact that the Sleepless Historian channel is 100% AI generated becomes even more obvious if you look at the channel's early uploads, where you have a stiff 3D avatar sitting in a chair and delivering a 1-hour lecture in a single take while maintaining the same rigid posture.)
If you look at Reddit comment sections on large default subs, many of the top-voted posts are obviously composed by GPT. People post LLM-generated stories to the /r/fantasywriters subreddit and get praised for their "beautiful metaphors.
The revealed preference of many people is that they love AI-generated content, they are content to watch it on YouTube, upvote it on Reddit, or "like" it on Facebook. These people are not part of "the Midjourney community," they just see AI-generated content out in the wild and enjoy it.
By paradox460 2025-11-1323:231 reply Reddit has been full of bad fake stories for ages. All that AI does is automate it
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-11-147:511 reply Karma farming accounts I guess.
I loved it when sometimes on r/Aita or something people would call out the sheer inconsistencies of the karma farming accounts
"So you are telling me that you were 26 year old and now you are suddenly 40??"
Or just sheer inconsistencies which can make one laugh at the whole situation.
By paradox460 2025-11-1417:02 The biggest problem is every story telling sub eventually grows the rule "don't question the story"
I'm not sure why the mods adopt it. Maybe they think having a comment section full of people calling out a lie isn't good or something, but whenever the rule goes into place it's like a switch is thrown, and shortly thereafter all the stores in that sub will rot away into lies
Happened to tales from tech support, I don't work here, several parenting subreddits, aita, and more
By lawlessone 2025-11-1322:39 Their rate of uploads makes it obvious too. 3 hour videos multiple times a week.
Compare that Fall Of Civilizations (a fantastic podcast btw) that often has 7 months between videos.
By ropable 2025-11-144:14 I really, really wish that Youtube would start tagging this category of video to increase the visibility to end users. My feeling is that the main reason this content might be "winning" in the market is the sheer volume.
By rockskon 2025-11-143:17 Remains to be seen if that's sustainable or a flash in the pan.
By cruffle_duffle 2025-11-143:43 Dude I had to stop watching that “sleepy whatever” channel. It was so blatant simply based upon how frequent the “thing” was posting. It’s simply not possible for a human to crank out well researched two hour long videos daily. And even then, the things content is so repetitive in each video (granted that might be the point, it is “sleepless historian” after all).
That sleepless channel is one of an entire series of very similar channels with the same voice and same “style” of content. Some get lots of views, others not so much.
Honestly, eventually people will spot that shit stuff from a mile away. None of it is unique nor does it add any “entropy” as some other commenter here said.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-11-147:50 I can attest to this.
I don't remember what channel but recently I have been into dexter and I have been watching a lot of dexter related content on youtube and I once think that I saw either down-right AI generated or very LLM-y style video / channel in general. Like, the way they speak etc. felt very AI generated imo.
Nobody questioned it in the comments.
I genuinely started wondering what is the point of AI generated content when people will find out its AI and then reject it or shame them etc. but I think that either I believed that humans in general would detect it more often or maybe the fact that people would start using AI in very sneaky ways maybe to not be labelled AI slop while still being very AI assisted.
I don't have problem with AI assistance but I just feel this hate when an AI generated voice speaks AI generated text which I recognize due to the patterns like
"It isn't just X, Its y" and the countless others examples.
By anal_reactor 2025-11-1322:434 reply Hot take but I don't care if the content I consume is AI-generated or not. First of all, while sometimes I need high-effort quality content, sometimes I want my brain to rest and then AI-generated slop is completely okay. He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone. Second, just because something is AI-generated it doesn't automatically mean it's slop, just like human-generated content isn't automatically slop-free. Boring History For Sleep allowed me to see medieval times in a more emotional way, something that history books "this king did this and then won but then in 1274 was poisoned and died" never did.
By blargey 2025-11-1323:10 > He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone
I'm not in a rock-throwing mood, but I qualify for that easily. False consensus effect cuts against AI...mass-production? aficionados just as much as hardline opponents.
By FridgeSeal 2025-11-142:003 reply > He who didn't binge-watch garbage reality TV can cast the first stone
Stand by then, because I have rocks and according to you, licence to throw them.
You are free to watch all the slop you want. All I want is for your slop, to not be at the cost of all other media and content. Have a SlopTube, have SlopFlix, go for it! But do it in a way that is _separate_ and doesn’t inflict it on the rest of us, who would _like_ human produced content, even if the AI stuff is “just as good”.
Your later point is hard to convey to people who don't want to hear it.
I don't want AI content, even if it is as good, or even if it were better. The human element IS the point, not an implementation detail.
An AI song about sailing at sea is meaningless because I know the AI has never sailed at sea. This is a standard we hold humans to, authenticity is important even for human artists, why would we give AI a pass on it?
And I mean this earnestly, if an AI in a corporeal form really did go sailing, I might then be interested in its song about sailing.
By akoboldfrying 2025-11-148:172 reply > An AI song about sailing at sea is meaningless because I know the AI has never sailed at sea.
Human singers often sing about topics they have no authentic experience with. Some pop singers exclusively sing songs written by other people.
You're entitled to dislike AI music, but I think your attempt to justify this dislike doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
By ehnto 2025-11-1411:56 I don't really want to get pedantic about this, but I also don't listen to pop and authenticity in lyrics is important to me. But authenticity in creation is just as important, I listen to a lot of music with no lyrics at all and it is important to me that it was borne of someone's creative experience.
Regardless of any of that, I could also say that I don't like AI music because I prefer my artists to have hot showers and it's somewhat none of your business, respectfully.
By anal_reactor 2025-11-148:251 reply HackerNews holds AI to much higher standards than humans. In other news, water is wet.
> And I mean this earnestly, if an AI in a corporeal form really did go sailing, I might then be interested in its song about sailing.
Would you? That seems achievable with current technology, bolt a PC with a camera onto a sailing ship and prompt it to compose text based on some image recognition.
By ehnto 2025-11-146:13 For sure, I wouldn't read it as if it were a human story though since I can relate and empathise with the human. But it would be interesting to see what kind of experience it had and how it records and explains it.
By GrzegorzWidla 2025-11-168:25 For it to have meaning it would have to be an AI without prior experience or knowledge of sailing embedded into its systems.
By danudey 2025-11-142:15 Just let me choose a filter when I'm doing a search on YouTube and that's a good start. Beyond that I can just block or 'don't recommend this channel' for anything that shows up in my feed, but the fact that these platforms don't let people say 'I don't want this garbage' is the biggest issue I have with it.
By anal_reactor 2025-11-147:54 No, you get your separate HumanTube.
I mean, that certainly is a hot take, but you are getting down voted without people responding why.
I can certainly understand just wanting filler content just for background noise, I had the history for sleep channel recommended to me via the algorithm because I do use those types of videos specifically to fall asleep to. However, and I don't know which video it was, but I clicked on a video, and within 5 minutes there were so many historical inaccuracies that I got annoyed enough to get out of bed and add the channel to my block list.
That's my main problem with most AI generated content, it's believable enough to pass a general plausibility filter but upon any level of examination it falls flat with hallucinations and mistruths. That channel should be my jam, I'm always looking for new recorded lectures or long form content specifically to fall asleep to. I'm definitely not a historian and I wouldn't even call myself a dilettante, so the level of inaccuracies was bad enough that even I caught it in a subject I'm not at all an expert in. You may think you are learning something, but the information quality is so bad that you are actively getting more misinformed on the topic from AI slop like that.
By anal_reactor 2025-11-148:241 reply I feel like people's pride is getting in the way. On this website people want to present themselves as intelectuals, and anything that breaks this image is a big no-no. Nobody wants to watch slop, everyone wants quality content, yet for some curious, inexplicable reason that scientist all over the world scratch their heads over, most TV channels start as "The Learning Channel" and end up as TLC.
Regarding the second point, that's true, but I feel like we're focusing on worst examples instead of best examples. It's like, when I was a kid my parents would yell at me "you believe everything they say on the internet!" and then they would watch TV programs explaining why it's scientifically certain that the world would end in 2012. There's huge confirmation bias "AI-generated content bad" because you don't notice the good AI-generated content, or good use cases of low-quality content. Circling back to Boring History To Sleep, even if half of it is straight-up lies, that's completely irrelevant, because that's not the point here. The point here is to have the listener use their imagination and feel the general vibe of historical times. I distinctly remember listening to the slop and at some point really, really feeling like I was in some peasant's medieval hut. Even if the image I had was full of inaccuracies, that's completely fine, because AI allowed me to do something I'd never done before. If I ever want to fix my misconceptions I'll just watch more slop because if you listen to 100 different AI-generated podcasts on the same topic, each time it'll hallucinate in a different way, which means that truthful information is the only information that will consistently appear throughout majority of them, and that's what my brain will pick up.
> when life gives you lemons, make lemonade
And people who wanted that quality content alwaya desert the channel you talk about. Your argument really boils down to "if you are not the biggest economic driver, cheap to produce then you have no right for that preference".
And even worst "serious history dont need to exist, because most people just want something relaxing after stresful day".
By anal_reactor 2025-11-1417:14 You're absolutely right!
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-11-147:56 If you want AI-generated c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶ (slop), then you should go ahead and generate it yourself via chatgpt,claude,aistudio gemini and many many others...
> human-generated content isn't automatically slop-free
I can agree but I wouldn't call human generated content slop, more like messy at worst. Human generated content can actually grow and be unique whereas AI generated slop cannot
> I wonder where the obstinacy on the part of certain CEOs come from.
I can tell you: their board, mostly. Few of whom ever used LLMs seriousl. But they react to wall street and that signal was clear in the last few years
"Completely detached from reality" we used to call it. But where is the money coming from? Is it because we abolished the idea of competition, they never suffer negative impacts of bad decisions any more?
By Libidinalecon 2025-11-1411:45 We are in a bad situation. Some of our biggest and best companies went from being "capex lite" to "capex light money on fire" and caused a capex light money on fire social contagion. The money is from debt financing. Things are bad and we don't even know who is completely full of shit because we are still at high tide.
By estimator7292 2025-11-1322:26 Full on sunk cost fallacy and "business" hysteria. There is no logic, only fads and demands for exponential growth now and also forever.
By raincole 2025-11-144:50 Are you implying Kagi is on the "nothing to do with LLM" side? Even Kagi uses LLMs to summarize news.
https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97
LLMs just make too much economic sense to be ignored.
By veunes 2025-11-1913:03 The CEOs obstinacy comes from simple economics: the cost of producing content with AI is trending toward zero, which allows for scaling content farms to unprecedented sizes. It's a constant race for attention, so the goal is no longer quality, but volume
you have a very narrow definition of "people"
on Instagram AI content is highly popular, some videos have 50mil views and half a million likes
By jaredcwhite 2025-11-148:22 And if you believe any of those numbers mean anything, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
By danudey 2025-11-142:02 If creators are required to disclose that they used AI to create, modify, or manipulate content then I should be able to filter out content created with AI. Even if I'm thinking of a specific video it's getting harder to find things because of the ridiculous amount of mass-produced slop out there.
I don't really care if people produce this sort of crap; let the market sort it out, maybe something of value will come of it. It's the fact that, as Kagi points out, it's getting more and more difficult to produce anything of value because content creators operating in good faith with good intentions get drowned out by slop peddlers who have no such limitations or morals.
By BeFlatXIII 2025-11-1418:38 > people at large
In your social circles.
By jatora 2025-11-140:45 not exactly nothing to do with it, they still use generative AI to assist search
and saying 'it is no more'... sigh. such a weird take. the world's coming for you
HN could use some of this. It'd be nice if there was a safe having from the equivalent of high grade junk mail.
By rrr_oh_man 2025-11-1411:443 reply I built https://itter.sh because of that
By calvinmorrison 2025-11-1323:364 reply we just need human attestation. A vial of blood per comment
By code_biologist 2025-11-147:08 Love it. This has Cobra Effect style perverse incentive written all over it. You'd be shocked how quickly you can get a big bag of blood vials if you know the right people.
By rrr_oh_man 2025-11-1412:36 Please drink a verification can.
By steinvakt2 2025-11-147:581 reply Isn't "Proof of Humanity" kind of interesting here: https://proofofhumanity.id
By pajamasam 2025-11-1410:05 I'd want a "proof of humanity" without needing to reveal my identity...
By jacquesm 2025-11-140:00 I can live with that ;)
