Tired of AI images online? This search engine lets you hide them from results now

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused browser and search engine, has released a new setting on its search engine that allows users to hide AI-generated images. "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," the company said on X last week. Also: I test AI tools for a living. Here are 3 image generators I actually use and how To that end, the company has added a feature that makes it easy to filter out AI images, so you don't have to see them. The new filter works with open-source blocklists (such as uBlockOrigin's "nuclear" list and uBlacklist's "Huge AI Blocklist") to give users control over the kinds of images they want to see. This new feature doesn't eliminate AI-generated images from the search, but rather, vastly reduces the number of such images that appear in your searches. There are two ways you can manage the control of AI-generated images. If you go to the DuckDuckGo search site and search for an image, you can then click the AI Images drop-down and select Hide. That option is done on a per-search basis. Filtering AI-generated images from a single DuckDuckGo search is simple. Jack Wallen/ZDNET If you want to do away with AI-images for all searches, click the gear icon on the DuckDuckGo page, click Manage (associated with AI Features), and then click the Off button to switch it to On. Once you've done that, all searches will filter out AI-generated images. You can opt to filter AI-generated images from all of your DuckDuckGo searches with this setting. Jack Wallen/ZDNET This new feature is important because it marks the first search engine to hand over such controls to the user. Google doesn't allow filtering AI-generated images from its search, and for anyone who'd prefer not to see such content, DuckDuckGo is the best option. This will be an important feature, as more and more AI-generated content is included in searches. You can read more about this on the DuckDuckGo official X account. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.