The AI surge is here.
Since our inaugural deep dive into AI’s encroachment on our lives, we’re back with updates, resources, and solutions to help you protect your online properties and navigate business around technologies designed to make human creations obsolete.
WordPress 7, Divi theme, and Google Search are important tools that we use at kaleidaweb. All have recently joined the AI movement. WordPress 7 now includes AI infrastructure by default, Divi theme has AI tools available to add-on, and Google Search, as we know it, is over.
Google announced that it will begin prioritizing AI-generated responses in search results over human-written website articles starting on Tuesday, May 26.
This move makes it significantly harder for small, independent websites to organically gain traffic. This is due to its “‘intelligent search box,’” which Google explains is “the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago,” Tech Crunch reported.
This means that results from internet searches will predominantly come from “AI agents” instead of humans. People will be presented information without needing to click links manually to retrieve it.
“This is tragic,” author, adjunct professor, and kaleidaweb copy lead Tamryn Spruill said. “It is hard enough for educators to teach students to appropriately evaluate source material. This move by Google will make it even more challenging to convince students of the need to review sources for themselves and decide their validity and relevance.”
We’re not on board with having AI dictate the sources of our knowledge. If you share our concerns about AI’s rapid takeover of the internet, we’ve pulled together the following list of anti-AI search tools, some with green initiatives.
ANTI-AI RESOURCES
- DuckDuckGo is a browser extension and search engine that filters out AI and AI images. DuckDuckGo has its own desktop and mobile browsers, plus extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera. The browser was built for data protection, not data collection.
- Dogpile is a search engine that has been around for years. It produces AI-free results from most major search engines—all in one place.
- Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees and restores biodiversity with green initiatives; AI is optional.
Other engines prioritizing ecology as a counterpunch to AI include:
- SearchForTrees is the antithesis of AI. SearchForTrees excludes AI, which ravages Earth’s natural resources to fuel its data centers, and claims to give 60 percent of its advertising revenue from searches to tree planting. The site counts the number of trees planted and the number planted by each user. Its free to install the browser on Firefox.
- OceanHero allows users to search the web and help ocean cleanup along the way.
We also discovered a resource for creatives:
- ArtShield offers tools that empower human artists to defend themselves and protect their creative and intellectual property against theft by AI.
How kaleidaweb is defying AI’s proliferation
At kaleidaweb, we’re committed to learning new technologies as they emerge and developing policies to protect our content and the online properties of our clients.
- kaleidaweb uses Cloudflare’s web hosting tools to block AI crawlers from our website and our clients’ websites (unless otherwise requested).
- We do our due diligence when it comes to researching plugins, following the guidelines presented by Hosting.com to check reviews and routinely check notifications in our admin dashboard. “These are basic security 101, and I’m going to be one of those who sticks with these basics for now,” Ahmed Zunaid wrote. We agree that old-fashioned vigilance is a great weapon against the AI infrastructure that is being integrated into systems by default and bubbling underneath.
- At kaleidaweb, we disable AI in our WordPress themes and plugins wherever possible. It’s always an option to turn on if requested, which we typically do not advise.
We’re real humans with over 28 years of experience in web design and a vault filled with tried and proven solutions. We hope these tools help our clients and website visitors to stay safe online. I don’t believe artificial intelligence (an oxymoron) is inevitable.
AI only proliferates if we allow it. In support of humanity, we defy AI.
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