DuckDuckGo is taking on ChatGPT without busting your privacy

Privacy-focused web browser DuckDuckGo is adding artificial intelligence (AI) smarts to its search results with a new summarizer feature. It’s just the latest browser to integrate AI into its offerings, and suggests you can have both privacy and AI in the age of ChatGPT. Dubbed DuckAssist, the tool takes your search query and generates an answer summary from Wikipedia, placing this synopsis at the top of your search results. In keeping with DuckDuckGo’s emphasis on privacy, DuckAssist works anonymously using AI natural language technology. Right now, the feature is free to use and doesn’t require you to sign up or create an account. DuckDuckGo says DuckAssist is currently in beta, but it should be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks. Beyond that, DuckDuckGo is also working on a “series of generative AI-assisted features” that should arrive in the next few months. DuckAssist works by scanning a “specific set of sources” to find its answers. That’s usually Wikipedia at the moment, but also includes related websites such as Britannica. Because it’s just taking information from one main source rather than collating data from several outlets, DuckDuckGo says DuckAssist should be less likely to “hallucinate” than similar tools from rivals. Because it’s based on natural language AI from OpenAI and Anthropic, DuckDuckGo says DuckAssist should be “more directly responsive to your actual question than traditional search results” you might get from the best web browsers. However, it will not be error-free, the developers say, and could struggle with finding the most relevant information and tackling particularly complex subjects. DuckDuckGo says it is working to improve the tool and its results, however. If you’re concerned about your searches being shared with companies like OpenAI, DuckDuckGo says not to worry. Your browsing and search history is not saved or shared, and anything used to create DuckAssist summaries is private and anonymous. Your queries are not used to train the AI models used by OpenAI or Anthropic, either. The explosion in popularity of AI tools like ChatGPT has raised a large number of concerns, but it seems DuckAssist could at least offer a more private alternative to tools like ChatGPT in Microsoft Bing. We’ll have to see how it develops over the coming weeks and months. Over the past few months, numerous cases have emerged where interactions with AI chatbots have gone haywire, culminating in lost lives, medical trauma, and incidents of psychosis. Experts suggest young users could be particularly vulnerable, especially when they’re going through emotional turmoil. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI says it will soon warn parents about such behavior. What’s changing? The domain of AI has quickly gone from seeking answers from a chatbot to getting multi-step web-based work done for you, like booking restaurant tables, adding stuff to your Amazon cart, and performing deep back-and-forth research. But it looks like the answers you get, especially when it comes to online shopping, depend on the AI chatbot you are using.  “Platforms disagree on brand recommendations for 61.9% of queries,” says an analysis conducted by BrightEdge. The company assessed tens of thousands of shopping-related questions that were provided to ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Google’s AI Mode in Search.  Social media began as a tool for staying connected with the people you love. Over time, its harms were exposed, leading to these platforms building parental control tools. It seems a similar movement for AI chatbots, starting with the one that started it all — ChatGPT. OpenAI has announced that it is exploring parental guardrails while using ChatGPT. “We will also soon introduce parental controls that give parents options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT,” the company said in a blog post.