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

Read Articleadded Dec 1, 2025
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 overall sentiment of the Hacker News discussion is mixed, leaning towards a concerned but skeptical perspective regarding the article's proposed solution. While there is strong agreement about the severe and ongoing degradation of internet content quality due to AI and other factors, many commenters doubt the effectiveness and long-term viability of a simple date-based filter. There's a shared sense of frustration with the current state of search, but also a significant debate on the root causes and appropriate countermeasures, with some viewing the extension as a limited or ultimately futile effort.

In Agreement

  • Search engine quality, particularly Google's, has significantly declined over the years due to SEO spam, ads, and irrelevant features, with AI exacerbating this existing problem.
  • The public release of ChatGPT led to a massive and rapid increase in indistinguishable, low-quality, auto-generated content, overwhelming the internet.
  • Human-generated content, especially from the pre-AI era, is increasingly valued as more trustworthy and a source of 'low-background tokens' in a 'slop-filled' internet.
  • AI-generated content is often confidently incorrect, hallucinatory, and contributes to a 'slop training slop' feedback loop, further degrading the quality of information online.
  • The ability to filter content by date, as demonstrated by other search tools like Kagi, can be effective in reducing current-era 'slop' and improving result quality for many topics.

Opposed

  • The decline in search quality and the prevalence of auto-generated 'slop' (SEO spam, content farms, earlier LLMs like GPT-2/3) significantly predates ChatGPT's release, rendering a Nov 2022 cutoff insufficient.
  • Google's `before:` operator, which the extension likely uses, is unreliable and gameable as it often relies on self-declared page dates, not indexing dates, allowing content to falsely claim an older publication date.
  • Human-generated content is not inherently high quality or trustworthy, and the date filter alone does not guarantee factual or valuable information.
  • A date-based filter is viewed as a temporary or naive solution; the problem requires adaptation, more advanced AI-filtering tools, or a fundamental change in how content is produced and consumed.
  • Some argue that the AI 'slop' problem is overstated, primarily replacing existing SEO spam, and that users should improve their own 'search hygiene' rather than relying on such drastic filters.