Show HN: Weedout – Safari extension that hides YouTube AI-labeled videos
I'm the developer. I built this because AI-generated conspiracy videos were getting out of control in my own YouTube feed. Weedout is a $1.99 Safari extension for macOS that removes videos YouTube labels “Made with AI” from feed, search, related videos, playlists and Shorts. It uses YouTube's label rather than AI detection, runs locally, and does not catch unlabeled videos. Source for developers who want to fork or build: https://github.com/masteranza/weedout-for-youtube Pull requests are not accepted; the repository is for independent forks.
Discussion Highlights (15 comments)
thatmf
I wish I had this but for every website and media surface
singpolyma3
I'm more concerned about the stuff that is fraudulent then possibly legit stuff explicitly labelled as AI
ranger_danger
You can charge money for browser extensions? And people pay for them? I'm in the wrong business.
lukeasch21
This is great, but why start with Safari and not a cross platform browser? Is there something native here that can't be done otherwise or is it just personal preference?
gregjw
Safari? Of all browsers? Why not start with Chromium?
Schnitz
I’ve found that the AI label doesn’t necessarily mean AI slop, it just means there’s a non zero amount of AI in the video. I want to avoid AI slop but not all videos that have an AI title screen or whatever.
dathinab
one problem is that algorithms(1) to detect AI generated content are surprisingly bad like non-AI generated animated/cartoon content is much more likely to be mistakenly labeled as AI then some somewhat realistic "looking" but for a human still clearly AI slop content some platforms (TickTock) seem to label anything as fully AI generated iff the metadata indicates certain tools like Adobe Illustrator are used, independent on how it was been used --- (1): If that tool is "ask an AI" then its not surprising at all. It's content which AI tried to make look as realistic as possible, the same (and potentially similar) AI will see it as "as realistic as possible"...
ungreased0675
I’d love a small local model that detects AI voices and blocks the content.
karim79
My pet peeve is the AI generated voices. I absolutely love the cosmology-astrophysics-space stuff. And it can be any crap if it's correct enough and entertaining enough and passive enough that I can fall asleep to it. But once I detect that the voiceover is AI generated that shit get instablocked forever. It's an instant put-off. Do all the visuals you want with AI as long as they are reasonable but when a human (AI) voice starts to fuck with the way a word has been presented in a particular context then it just makes me want to hate everything I won't mention any names <cough> elevenlabs.
consumer451
My only concern is that I have seen legit videos by creators on the platform for many years, with the tiny "AI (i)" label below the video. I have seen this even on channels that are not faceless. You would think if anyone could get this right, it would be Google/YouTube, but apparently not.
MarioMan
This is great. Having the option to choose whether or not to see AI content was the first thing I hoped they'd add a filter for when it was first introduced. Just for kicks, I inverted the filter in a TamperMoneky script that only keeps the AI-generated content: https://gist.github.com/SMarioMan/32c959d79035cb421df1c69c06...
negura
This is what they mean when they say AI amplifies inequality. If you're technically competent, you just write yourself an extension to block the slop spam, or at least pay to install one. So in the end it's rotting much more the brains of the least prepared.
vivzkestrel
- stupid question: how does this sort of thing work? - like how do you actually determine if a video was AI made or not? - what is the algorithm used? what is the threshold for a video to be considered slop? - what do you do? download the videos with yt-dlp split them into frames and run each frame by what?
tartoran
This is great and hope it'll be compatible with more and more browsers. This should be done by youtube themselves. It's so simple for them to label AI generated content so people can either look for it or avoid it but they won't do it. I'm not sure how they profit from AI gen videos over regular videos... I was looking for a setting to turn off Youtube Shorts but there's no way to do it, it's like that by design, Youtube want to shove those in your face so you click on it, even if by accident. Luckily I found a free app to do it (IOS). I absolutely appreciate the effort people put into fighting these companies back.
userbinator
There are tons of human-generated videos on YouTube that aren't worth watching either, and usually can be identified by "screamer" thumbnails and vapid clickbaity titles. I don't think we need to amplify another divisive topic.