Sick of AI-Generated Images? DuckDuckGo Will Filter Them Out For You.

We’re halfway through 2025, and as a culture we seemed to have decreed that AI slop is the term of the year. Never heard of AI slop? Bless your sweet innocence.

It’s the particularly debauched, concentrated form of AI-generated imagery that makes no real attempt to be useful, helpful, or realistic.

Society’s in a panic right now that it’s rotting our brains, but I’m more convinced that the actual threat comes from AI-generated images that quashes real-life creatives’ ability to earn a living and AI-generated images masquerading as real ones.

Whichever you’re sick of, DuckDuckGo has introduced a way to block them from showing up in your search results. And while they don’t claim that it’ll be perfect, it does promise to cut down greatly on the flood of AI-generated images that crowd out the human-created ones.

New setting: hide AI-generated images in DuckDuckGo

Our philosophy about AI features is “private, useful, and optional.” Our goal is to help you find what you’re looking for. You should decide for yourself how much AI you want in your life – or if you want any at all. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/pTolmsEQlQ

— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) July 14, 2025

you don’t need to download the browser

DuckDuckGo is two things. It’s a search engine that you can use within any other browser—Chrome, Safari, Firefox, whatever—to replace Google. And it’s also a browser that you can use to replace those other browsers.

Whichever you use, you’ll notice that within the tool bar under the search bar when searching for images via DuckDuckGo, there’s a new option called “AI images.” Click it and you’ll be able to hide them from your results.

I’ve used DuckDuckGo’s browser. I’ve used a lot of browsers, even the ones nobody’s heard of. DuckDuckGo, along with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Brave, and Mullvad are all installed currently on various devices, and that’s not counting the ones currently out of my rotation that I’ve used recently.

I’d recommend it if you’re looking for greater privacy from Chrome but don’t want a browser so locked-down and secure that it breaks most websites, which is a concern from the most hardened, secure browsers, such as Mullvad.

“The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist,” explained DuckDuckGo in an X post. “While it won’t catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.”

“Greatly reduced” is exactly the kind of phrase I like to see when attached to AI-generated imagery.