Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

I feel like this title is misleading, all this does is make an HTTP request to the site and let an LLM summarize its content. It does not just "cut the crap", it cuts everything and boils it down to AI slop. Point it towards a high quality scientific article, and you'll see that it doesn't just cut "crap", but any information that might be valuable.

I get that this can be useful for some sites, I've used Kagi Summarizer (https://kagi.com/summarizer) in the past, which does basically the same thing. To me, it doesn't seem like the solution to AI slop would be to turn it into shorter AI slop, the better "solution" would be to avoid AI slop and to block SEO optimized slop websites from showing up wherever possible.

Much of the trash on the internet has nothing to do with AI, but instead is caused by using AdSense type funding. If you have a site and use revenue from ads as your funding, then the way to in increase your revenue is more show more ads.

So add more fluff, move the actual thing people are looking for to the bottom, etc. Oh and add controversy, "The only authentic". Then add sex - a suggestive photo.

The thing is that AI can now generate these sites for you so no need to do anything yourself.

Finally pay Google to feature your ad - I mean recipe - and do other stuff to ensure that real recipes do not steal your traffic. :-)

I don't understand what "AI" is referring to here. Seems like it's removing useless fillers in general, which makes the title underselling it. I thought it was a service removing AI images or something, which wouldn't be that interesting.

The irony of AI removing AI content. I used this for my marketing generation (using AI of course) real estate business and it misinterpreted examples as the actual listings.

Also if you use Https instead of https in the url field it gives an error…

One data-point, tested on a recipe website (https://prettysimplesweet.com/french-toast) and got what I was looking for without the fluff.

How about the ability parametrize with the target URL? Something like https://cut-the-crab.streamlit.app/[TARGET_URL] ?

I guess "fighting fire with fire" is a valid response, but historically it's also lead to the much worse arms race in many situations. Instead of trying to win a game I believe is illegitimate, I prefer not to play.

This chain is also kinda funny: "Cut the BS!" > Streamlit App > Streamlit bought by Snowflake to push their pretty low value (IMO) but very expensive AI play. You should figure out how to run this against the output of Snowflake AI; you'd probably end up with an SQL query result set :)

Say what you will, this “AI” hype has top-notch entertainment value. I mean, getting people sold on the idea that they need “AI” to lessen the impact of “AI” on their lives is a level of absurdity that other marketing scams can only look at with envy. Interesting times.

I pointed it to PornHub, and it returned this curiously wholesome summary:

  - 140 million daily engaged users
  - 600,000 active content creators
  - 1 million hours of free content available
  - Features include playlist creation and community engagement
  - Tailored video suggestions
  - Option to subscribe to Pornhub Premium for exclusive content at $9.99/month with a free week trial available.

There is an existing app for this: https://www.boringreport.org/

But a plugin is nice too.

I half expected it to just show me empty pages.

There’s an interesting hypothetical situation here:

Let’s say that use of AI generated SEO to game search and recommendation algorithms become very widespread. This drives adoption of summarizers because reading these articles is a chore.

The result is that there a whole big chunk of “shadow-text” going unread by users BUT is still being used to drive ranking and discoverability.

There’s essentially a divorce between “content used to rank” and “content delivered to the user”, which could result in a couple different outcomes:

- search is forced to adapt in a way that brings these into alignment, so ranking is driven by the content people want to see and isn’t easily gamed

- SEO is allowed to get really, really weird because you can throw whatever text you want in there knowing that users will never see it

Feels like it “RSS-ified” a given website, which is a good vibe. Something like this baked into RSS-Bridge or some other feed curation platform could be a great way to ingest websites that lack RSS feeds themselves, especially if the codebase can run locally.

We are at a day and age where information source are now once again valuable.

Before you would buy books and newspaper to get information, then it became free with the internet and ads, and the information quality quickly decreased, now it's becoming once again required to look for 'non ai', non ads and paid information source because the alternative is an increasingly waste of time.

This website it showed me by default is USA today website, even with ublock when I tried to read through the original website I could only see a little box of text between a video taking half the screen on the bottom and 'up next' thing on the top.

I suggest everyone to look for quality and non biased information source, it still does exist, and pay for it.

You don't need to learn everything to make it worth it, but when I want to know about something going on, its worth it to know I got the best of the best information and don't have to look on a dozen different website.

In France la croix is a good information source.

I've tried a bunch of different sites and when this tool works it's fantastic, when it doesn't it is misleading. For example, the results from looking at a specific digital marketing agency were generic concise info about digital marketing in general. In this case, yes it has distilled a lot of information into concise information, but focused on the wrong concepts.

A more straightforward application like cleaning recipes, and this thing is really helpful.

I like the general idea of this, but this feels like it is trying to do too much. Removing ads, trackers, and unnecessary widgets is mostly a solved problem using unlock origin (+ possibly privacy badger).

I think it is a step too far to try and completely remove the step of actually visiting the website you get content from. This is the same thing Google is trying to do with their AI summarizer in search. Is the expected endgame of this that all useful websites just shut down because no one but bots visits them anymore? Even if those sites are user-funded and not reliant on ads, I find it hard to believe that many people would use AI summaries from the site then subsequently donate to financially support it.

I'm much more in favor of an approach that involves still visiting the actual website, but removes the content that the user does not want to see (ublock origin style).

I would suggest that once the browser extension exists, that it should transform the site "in-place" after visiting the site then pressing a button on the extension. And I could see that potentially having value (but I suspect this would take a lot of work to get right).

I can't tolerate the web without an ad blocker, and it's not just ads. Pressure from ad networks to build sites that match advertising friendly structure makes every site overly verbose. Social media sites encourage cover images, so every blog post has an image (often unrelated, creepy, uncanny valley gen-AI). So cut-the-crap is valuable tool.

A different solution is to avoid content discovery mechanisms that funnel you to AI slop and other disfunction. I'd really like a search engine that could filter out sites with ads and affiliate links, because those sites have competing interests that lead to low quality or even harmful content.

Thankfully there's a sea of independent bloggers who don't care about revenue and just want to write. They build websites that are reader friendly and aren't painful to interact with.

Does it have a "remove the random life crap from online recipes"? That is the worst offender for me.

This is not fiable yet.

I just used it in a local news website and the result was terrible. Mixed within any article in this website there are links to other news. AI used that "news titles" to create the summary.

How does it work? How has it been validated?

You're removing a lot more than filler with this kind of tool. It's sort of like taking a journey but not bothering to enjoy the trip.

When a page has that much BS on it, is there actually anything worth reading?

I interpret a click bait title as having nothing to offer at all. On the off chance that there is something there, it will almost certainly be repeated elsewhere with less cruft.

I would like this to also help by rewriting the copy of app/SASS landing pages. So often I find myself bemused and frustrated by websites that don't communicate why I should be interested in their product. I.e. a description in simple terms about what's in it for me ? What are the benefits of the main features? How will this make my life better? (And also: why might this software be unsuitable for me?).

Howling the demons of the web went, banned from life by a new deamon, returned to the noise from which they came.

"You've created a tool that simplifies content by removing distractions and unnecessary information, focusing on delivering concise facts. Additionally, you're considering developing a Chrome extension that enhances this functionality by providing a cleaner reading experience. Feedback on this idea is welcome."

maybe add something about keeping pronouns consistent? otherwise pretty cool!

What model are you using for this? I can't help buy imagine this gets expensive

Putting aside this silliness of using AI to declutter AI generated noise... Can anyone explain why someone would be inclined to use this app as opposed to asking an existing AI chatbot to summarize an article? What exactly does this app add beyond that?

This needs to be built in at browser level.

This is great. Also i wish someone made Adblock for these "tools" that get shoved in your face by every service today, like Amazon's "Rufus" or BofA's "Emma" take up like half the mobile screen, utterly useless.

Is this just a prompt and an http request?

Can we see the prompt?

It would be all too easy to add “but remove anything positive about <political figure I don’t like>”

To a prompt.

I’m trying to reduce my extension exposure… I’ve heard too many stories from extension writers of being paid big sums to sell them off, and they’re replaced by some kind of malware. Nice, but I’d rather a proxy out website rather than yet another extension

I completely share your frustration with filler content and the tedious hunt for actual "news." (It speaks volumes about the state of the news industry—declining subscriptions, the normalization of clickbait, and a focus on quantity over quality.)

However, relying on AI as a solution has its own pitfalls: Even state-of-the-art models frequently generate inaccuracies and hallucinations, which raises questions about whether AI truly adds value if the extracted "information nugget" truly is what the original's essence is about or just another layer of BS.

Makes me think of bullshit.js bookmarklet

https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js/

This is great. Please put together an extension. I use Safari but this might get me to switch.

Something that would give me a button I could press to de-bullshit a site, not one that tries it on every single site maybe?

> I’m also thinking of making a Chrome extension

What's the point of giving all this data to Google?

But if you remove all the AI nonsense from corporate websites, how will the clueless bozos in charge make kissy faces to investors using "AI" anymore?

Cool! An extension would be nice.

Browsers may start offering this feature. I know Chrome is experimenting with built-in AI APIs to do things like summarization.

I think that the posted example doesn't even work correctly, dropping most of the article's text after the first several paragraphs. Why did you post something when you didn't apparently even bother to check the results for correctness?

Oh, wait. I'm starting to understand that you fed it through a bullshit generator rather than just stripping it of the various pieces of unrelated content and providing just the original text, which might've been interesting to me.

How about a plugin that turns every website into something formatted like Hackernews and even rewrites comments to sound more like Hackernews people.

Why is your url cut-the-crab and not cut-the-crap?

great!I make a similar website for me, which can remove nonsense and answer the title of news directly. My slogan is f* the writer of sensational headlines

It summarized my website pretty well :)

Would love to see an extension for Firefox!

If I could somehow really trust an AI not to have been spiked by some billionaire to manipulate me in one direction or other - I think I could enjoy using it as a sort of P.G Wodehouse Jeeves character in my life. Letting it access the web and giving me the gist, answering my questions / advising me etc.

I wonder if I could do something similar to find myself book recommendations. Something like cutting out all paragraphs that's mainly X (eg drama) then ranking books by the remaining %.

2000 character limit.

Would you share the prompt you are using?

As a test, I used the term ''golden syrup'' in the following recipe search engine:

https://recipe-search.typesense.org/?r

The first result was an eyesore made only slightly less objectionable by filtering and blocking:

https://www.food.com/recipe/golden-syrup-141640

but then passing that URL through this tool yielded clear, simple, de-enshittified results. Bravo!

Great for a text terminal browser!

What model do you use to summarize?

This is not a problem I feel, the nuggets of content are easy to find and read imho and I think there is a greater chance the AI will mess up the content's meaning. If you returned the full text of the article, that'd be cool.

Where your solution has potential is in removing the idiotic EU cookie banners, various useless popups, banners, obnoxious menus, autoplaying videos and what not.

If news websites were just a repository of text files, that would be great.