alt Hacker NewsI use duckduckgo but...
This is just marketing.
You get an "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" summary at the top of most searches. So... they're using AI, you can just hide the summary. So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit, and I'm now less trusting of duckduckgo if they're willing to pretend their 'no AI' angle is substantial. 30% increase on the noai.duckduckgo.com subdomain. I wonder what % that is of their total traffic? Can I guess <5%?
Techcrunch mentions this in the last paragraph.
Nice marketing I guess? If techcrunch would lead with pointing out this is just marketing and they're totally an AI company, this article would count as journalism.
Honest question: Are people this stupid? Are techcrunch reporters this credulous and uncritical? I am genuinely completely on board with replacing this kind of 'journalism' with AI summaries of PR releases rather than gild them with fading gleam of actual journalism.
I've been building information extraction and discourse analysis tools for exactly this reason: most 'journalism' is lower effort than a the AI summaries they're complaining about.
Replies
"AI is not the default" is not a claim made anywhere AFAICT, especially not with that wording. The only thing you could be referring to is the explicitly no-ai url, which AFAICT has no "Auto-Generated" "Search Assist" (that's kinda the point), and it also hasn't used that phrase ever that I've seen in months.
So I kinda feel I have to ask: did you read the article, or did you read an AI summary?
> So, the "Ai is not the default" claim is bullshit
Where was this claim made? Nowhere in the article says that.
Replace journalism with AI summaries... of what?
What is the AI going to summarize once journalism is dead?
I've used DDG as my primary search and it was maddening when they put that stupid AI response thing in there last year because it was not helpful and I'm a huge advocate of AI
Everything is marketing now
Step 1: read the article. Step 2 (optional): comment on the article.
You're doing these in the wrong order.