The privacy-focused DuckDuckGo search engine that \ has introduced AI Chat, an optional, free chatbot service - within limits - that provides a choice of models and "can be easily switched off."

Nothing expresses confidence in a product like reassuring potential users that there's an off-switch. But perhaps given the backlash against AI-infused software, that's a sensible brand prophylactic.

DuckDuckGo AI Chat, as described by Nirzar Pangarkar, lead designer at DuckDuckGo, "is an anonymous way to access popular AI chatbots," which is not to say that your IP address would be inaccessible to the company if it needed to find you. DuckDuckGo says it does not retain user IP addresses but it uses the network identifiers temporarily for security purposes.

The organization warns over user identification in its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service: "If you break the law or violate these Terms when using AI Chat for commercial purposes and we get sued, you may have to take responsibility."

Forbidden things include: illegal or harmful activities; violating the rights of others; creating spam or malware; sexually explicit or obscene activities; things that cause physical or economic harm, or violate the law; regulated activities (e.g. law, medicine, finance); or interfering with ChatAI or other DuckDuckGo services.

But so long as you don't use AI Chat for evil, DuckDuckGo's anonymization of your bot banter should remain in place and identifying information will be withheld from data addicts like OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic.

To the search engine's credit, it has committed to not take user inputs for model training and is requiring that its AI model providers not use submitted prompts or generated output to develop or improve their models. What's more, partners are supposed to delete all information received within 30 days, with exceptions for safety and legal compliance.

DuckDuckGo AI Chat allows users to choose between two proprietary models (OpenAI's GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku) and two open source models (Meta Llama 3 and Mistral's Mixtral 8x7B), and plans to add more options at some point.

When making a choice, the user is presented with a summary menu that outlines the differences in the models, mainly that the two commercial models have "high built-in moderation" while Llama 3 has "medium built-in moderation" and Mixtral has "low built-in moderation."

Pangarkar acknowledges that companies are adding AI because everyone else is doing so, but insists DuckDuckGo is simply pursuing its mission to provide products that respect user privacy.

"In the industry-wide race to integrate generative AI, there’s a lot of pressure to add AI features just for the sake of saying you have them," he states. "We’re taking a different approach. Before adding any AI-assisted features to our products - first DuckAssist, our AI-enhanced Instant Answer, and now AI Chat - we think carefully about how to make them additive to the search and browse experience, and we roll them out cautiously to ensure this is the case.

"We also recognize these features aren’t for everyone, so we’ve made our AI-assisted features totally optional; if you’re not interested, you can easily switch them all off."

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is currently free, with an undeclared usage quota. Pangarkar says it is considering paid plans with higher usage limits and user-hosted options. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/06/06/duckduckgo_ai_chat/