Recently, I’ve searched things on the internet like usual. Questions I have about cooking or electronics or philosophy or whatever.

What to do when I burn my chili? AI results almost entirely, most from the same website with hundreds of posts that are only slightly different from each other. (The answer: it will always taste sort of burnt.)

Can I buy Costco pizza without a Costco card? Mostly AI results with varying answers and no actual research or information to back it up. (The answer: no.)

How to adjust self-closing door hinges? I find a post written by an obviously fake DIYer with an unpronounceable name, fake picture, is a certified expert in nothing, and wants to thank the Almighty for his furniture business, interior design business, carpentry skills, and search engine optimization specialty. (The answer: use a small nail or something, insert into a hole, rotate, take out the pin, put the pin again in a different spot to adjust tension.)

Some searches do come up with fairly good results, but the internet is now awash with fake people who have no experience because they aren’t actual people.

Even when I look for images and explicitly say to hide AI images, my search results are still full of AI that are often completely inaccurate depictions of whatever I want to see.

I don’t want AI results. I’m intentionally not using Google anymore because I don’t want Gemini to tell me an often-incorrect answer. I want to hear from people. I want advice from people.

And the people are now hidden. They aren’t gone, but I can’t find them anymore.

It’s really sad to realize that people put up all this useful information on the internet, often at great effort, and then AI used their words as training data and took over their jobs. I don’t want to live in that world, but here I am.

I’m realizing that I cannot use the internet like I used to. I can’t go to a search engine and type in what I’m looking for, because it will give me a bunch of robotic slop that only faintly pretends to be human.

I have to look at a website in a search result and see if it’s something I recognize, like a news source or a website I’ve been to in the past that I know comes from humans, and not robots. But I wish I could find those personal websites of people sharing good advice from their own experience. I miss having those available to me. All the recipe blogs were so good, and now so many of them are fake.

I’m not sure what to do now.

Maybe search Reddit? It’s full of bots too, though it can be useful.

Maybe just look at Wikipedia? I actually do look at Wikipedia a lot, and I’m grateful for their anti-AI policies. But it isn’t good for everything.

Do I use social media sites with their addictive algorithms? Maybe use WikiHow? Rely on the news tab of search results? Do I make a list of sites that claim not to use AI?

If you have any good advice for me, I would love it. How do you find the humans amid the outpouring of AI-generated content?

Here I am, writing on my own little website, feeling like the robots are taking over. I want human advice and human connection, but the internet is no longer the place for that. If I don’t see you face to face, how can I know you are real?

How do you know I am real, and that this isn’t just an AI-generated post?