Find Pre-AI Content: A Browser Extension That Filters Results Before Nov 2022

This browser extension filters search results to only content published before November 30, 2022. It uses the Google Search API to enforce this date cutoff, helping users avoid AI-generated material. The tool is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

Key Points

• The internet is increasingly flooded with AI-generated text, images, and video since late 2022.
• The tool filters search results to content published before November 30, 2022 (ChatGPT’s public release).
• It uses the Google Search API to enforce the publication date constraint.
• The extension aims to surface content more likely produced by humans.
• Available as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Sentiment

The community is broadly sympathetic to the tool's premise and the frustration with AI-degraded search quality, but there is significant skepticism about the specific approach. HN largely agrees that AI slop is a real and serious problem, while debating whether a date-based filter is an effective or sustainable solution. Overall sentiment leans positive toward the article's goals with pragmatic reservations.

In Agreement

• Search quality has significantly degraded due to AI-generated content flooding the web, and tools to filter it out address a genuine need.
• AI content has made it harder to find authentic human perspectives and original analysis online — the extension's premise is valid.
• The pre-ChatGPT web represents a valuable resource of uncontaminated, human-generated content, analogous to low-background steel forged before nuclear testing.
• AI content is being produced at a scale that human creators cannot compete with, destroying the signal-to-noise ratio across all platforms.
• The extension is conceptually clever as a practical workaround: using existing date filtering infrastructure to restore trust in search results.

Opposed

• The Nov 2022 cutoff doesn't solve the underlying problem — SEO-driven content farms and enshittification were already degrading search quality before ChatGPT.
• A date filter is an imperfect proxy for quality; plenty of valuable content exists after Nov 2022, and plenty of junk existed before it.
• The concern about AI content may be overblown; most AI slop simply replaces what was already low-quality SEO content, and improved search hygiene is sufficient.
• The tool has no long-term future as AI content will continue to proliferate, making the Nov 2022 cutoff increasingly irrelevant.
• The framing that 'human-created = higher quality' is flawed — humans also generate enormous quantities of low-quality content at scale.