Show HN: Weedout – Safari extension that hides YouTube AI-labeled videos

Show HN: Weedout – Safari extension that hides YouTube AI-labeled videos(masteranza.github.io)

180 points by masteranza 2 days ago | 81 comments

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.

ssernikk 1 day ago |

I love this concept, but use Firefox, so I ported it:

https://github.com/kacperwyczawski/herbisight (herbisight -> herbicide -> weeds, you know)

I've just submitted it to AMO for review (in the meantime, you can load extension/ via about:debugging). Will update the repo with the store link once approved!

kamyarg 1 day ago | |

Started working on a port yesterday and got time to continue today and just saw you had the same idea. Sharing for anyone interested:

https://github.com/kamyar/youtube-without-ai

Signed extension can be downloaded from latest release page:

https://github.com/kamyar/youtube-without-ai/releases/latest

vrganj 1 day ago | |

Thank you for your work, much appreciated!

tartoran 2 days ago |

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.

NotErnie 1 day ago | |

In the mobile app you can go to Settings > Time Management > Daily Limits > Shorts feed limit and set it to 0 minutes. It removes all shorts from your home feed.

If you click on a short, or the shorts tab you see "you reached your Shorts feed limit".

And if you click on the subcriptions tab theres only one section of shorts at the top and they don't show up again when you scroll down.

tatoalo 1 day ago | |

> I was looking for a setting to turn off Youtube Shorts

I put out shortless [0] for the very same reason...I just hate them. This works only on Safari, but I stopped using the native app altogether a long time ago, so it wasn't that big of a jump for me :)

[0]: https://shortless.app

Izkata 1 day ago | |

> 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.

There is a small "AI" tag that shows up below the title when viewing the video. Don't know if it's automatic or self-applied though.

ssernikk 1 day ago | |

> This is great and hope it'll be compatible with more and more browsers.

I agree! Just ported it to Firefox, see my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533429

Definitely gonna use it myself.

ultrarunner 2 days ago | |

Shouldn't their presumably unlimited access to Gemini models enable them to implement things like this quickly and easily?

afavour 1 day ago | | |

Yes but if it’ll lower overall video minutes viewed it’ll never make it into production.

MarioMan 2 days ago |

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...

consumer451 2 days ago |

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.

onion2k 2 days ago | |

I have seen this even on channels that are not faceless.

The AI logo doesn't mean "entirely made with AI". It means "significant use of AI detected". If someone uses AI to modify the background of their video (say, to remove a detail) it'll get the label.

ungreased0675 2 days ago |

I’d love a small local model that detects AI voices and blocks the content.

Suppafly 2 days ago | |

I'm not even sure you'd need AI for that, there are only like 3 voices that are ever used.

davidoduk 1 day ago | | |

And they all have the same tone, same inflection

userbinator 2 days ago |

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.

karim79 2 days ago |

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.

mrweasel 2 days ago | |

Many content creators on YouTube may not have English as their first language, so they turn to AI to do the voice over. The thing is, I'd rather listen to broken English read by a human than an AI voice over. The AI voices are off putting and tiresome. It's somehow hurts my brain less trying to process a Chinese person speak bad English. Alternatively for something like YouTube, add subtitles and just speak your own language is much more comfortable than the AI voice-overs.

carlosjobim 1 day ago | | |

They should make the videos in their own language. YouTube has subtitles.

lynx97 1 day ago | | |

Depends. I take an AI generated voice over a french guy trying to talk english every day! Same for japanese. I really try, but I find these two speaker types really hard to follow and stay alert.

therealpygon 1 day ago | |

I find it interesting that you were perfectly happy with it, enjoying it even, but it was only at the point you noticed a minor word pronounced incorrectly that you flip to the extreme, hate it and want to block it to never see it again?

I’ve started calling this “AI Bipolar”, and I find it fascinating. It seems like people are offended that they were “duped” into enjoying AI generated content, but will continue on to the next lower-quality human-made content with all sorts of issues that they will completely forgive solely out of comfort that it is a human doing it.

shoobiedoo 1 day ago | |

This is especially common in Japan now. I was looking for an audio documentary of the crusades and half of them were done in squeaky anime AI voices

Frannky 1 day ago |

I go on YouTube to watch humans talking, nature and music videos and get an insane amount of AI reviews, AI videos, and AI songs. What I find weird is how they end up at the top. Are people actually watching them, which is why they’re ranked so high? Or is the YouTube algorithm just being exploited? Fortunately, there are keywords that still bring back humans, but it’s so annoying.

zf00002 1 day ago | |

Something I've noticed in a couple hobbies on youtube, is that the popular channels are not the ones that show up when I search. Like for cars, there ar 2 particular youtubers who show up all over search results, but amongst the car community you will never hear people talk about watching their videos.

Foobar8568 1 day ago | |

Take a look at the most viewed videos... It's gross.

Basically 90% are just crap done by computers (pre AI), targeting preschoolers.

qsera 1 day ago | | |

most of them include potty training dinosaurs or monsters which shows authentic positions of such beings taking a shit, and the spectators ends up covered in or being bombarded with literal shit balls...

And know what is worse is that kids appear to prefer this to Tom and Jerry!

crefiz 1 day ago | |

Me and my inner circle do watch them (even my sister-in-law, unemployed, just started to tinker with)

Can't speak for them though but when I search smt I don't really care if it is the top youtuber in my country or a random model with fake pictures, I just want to watch it

kenanfyi 1 day ago |

It's funny the website is generated with AI. I'm kind of sure that the code as well.

singpolyma3 2 days ago |

I'm more concerned about the stuff that is fraudulent then possibly legit stuff explicitly labelled as AI

masteranza 2 days ago | |

True, but that's a way harder problem to solve. For me what was important was reducing the noise as much as possible as fast as possible consistently. Youtube algorithms has been pervasive enough that anything that moves the scale down even a little bit was worth the effort.

thatmf 2 days ago |

I wish I had this but for every website and media surface

embedding-shape 2 days ago | |

Ironically, if you had this for every website, including GitHub and HN, you wouldn't have seen this HN submission / repository :)

masteranza 2 days ago | | |

That's also true, you gotta fight fire with fire :)

masteranza 2 days ago | |

Well, AI flags this content so it's an easy target without heuristics - that's why I've started there.

mikeweiss 2 days ago | |

Need the EU, or California or some other large jurisdiction to create a law requiring identifying labels on all AI content

davidoduk 1 day ago | | |

AI companies would lobby hard against such a law

lukeasch21 2 days ago |

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?

masteranza 2 days ago | |

There's plenty of AI blocking Chrome extensions already, however I prefer Safari for personal stuff (and hence YouTube too) and use Brave for Google-gated work related stuff.

Schnitz 2 days ago |

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.

ranger_danger 2 days ago |

You can charge money for browser extensions? And people pay for them?

I'm in the wrong business.

masteranza 2 days ago | |

It's free on GitHub for anyone to build, use or fork. I've built it for myself, but going through App Store submissions took me 2x the time, hence the price.

0x1d7 2 days ago | |

They require signing which is $100/year.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/app-code-signing-pr...

haul_up 1 day ago |

Been waiting for something like this; YouTube's AI detection is wildly inaccurate and just clutters the feed. Installing immediately.

Tajnymag 1 day ago | |

The extension relies on YouTube's AI detection, so it won't be any more accurate.

vist_orn 1 day ago |

Finally, a way to reclaim my YouTube feed from the AI sludge. Been scrolling past too much uncanny valley lately.

torranx 1 day ago |

this is nice work, I'll be a user for sure, that is if there's one for firefox

malte87 1 day ago |

Could really help to scrap out the spam. Good concept!

elar_verole 1 day ago |

Should have been called YouMan !

negura 2 days ago |

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.

GaryBluto 1 day ago | |

Considering the design and language used on the extension's website I wouldn't doubt it could've been made by someone technically unskilled.

DylanMerigaud 1 day ago |

Clean launch, good luck!

mschuster91 1 day ago |

Check out the AiBlock extension, it has a community sourced list as well: https://github.com/Override92/AiSList

chukar 1 day ago |

Honestly, I've noticed a strange uptick in those videos. This sounds like a perfect solution to clean up the experience.

vivzkestrel 2 days ago |

- 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?

ffsm8 2 days ago | |

From the pitch itself

> Weedout is a $1.99 Safari extension for macOS that removes videos YouTube labels “Made with AI”

So no, none of that. Blows my mind if someone pays for that

dathinab 2 days ago |

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"...

sshussain270 1 day ago |

Ah! This is useful!

flanked-evergl 1 day ago |

YouTube needs a way to report mislabelled AI videos, and actually the "Made with AI" label is a bit misleading. I don't mind if it uses some AI, what I don't want is AI slop, and that can only really be reported by users.

Same with Instagram, they need a way to report AI.

EdZitron2 1 day ago |

They are self reported, any YouTube author can just say whether or not their video is ai, and they rarely do of they spent hours editing.

Look at gossipgoblin - you think that’s “just ai”?

gregjw 2 days ago |

Safari? Of all browsers? Why not start with Chromium?

adav 1 day ago | |

I would guess it's because Safari users are happy to pay a little money for an extension whereas most other browser users wouldn't.