DuckDuckGo's Building AI-Generated Answers Into Its Search Engine (theverge.com) 26
DuckDuckGo announced a new tool called DuckAssist that "automatically pulls and summarizes information from Wikipedia in response to certain questions," reports The Verge. From the report: DuckAssist's beta is live on the search engine right now -- but only through DuckDuckGo's mobile apps and browser extensions. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, says the company will add it to the web-based search engine if the trial "goes well." When you enter a question that DuckAssist can help with, you'll see a box that says "I can check to see if Wikipedia has relevant info on this topic, just ask" at the very top of your search results. Hit the blue "Ask" button, and you'll get an AI-generated answer using summarized information from Wikipedia. If DuckAssist has already answered a question once before, that response will automatically appear, which means you won't have to "ask" it the same thing multiple times.
While the tool's built upon language models from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, and the Google-backed Anthropic, Weinberg says it'll retain the same focus on privacy as DuckDuckGo. According to the announcement, DuckAssist won't share any personally identifiable information with OpenAI and Anthropic, and neither company will use your anonymous questions to train their models. DuckDuckGo says the feature uses the "most recent full Wikipedia download available," which is around a few weeks old, so it might not be able to help if you're searching for something later than that. However, the company plans to update this in the future, as well as add more sources for DuckAssist to draw from.
While the tool's built upon language models from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, and the Google-backed Anthropic, Weinberg says it'll retain the same focus on privacy as DuckDuckGo. According to the announcement, DuckAssist won't share any personally identifiable information with OpenAI and Anthropic, and neither company will use your anonymous questions to train their models. DuckDuckGo says the feature uses the "most recent full Wikipedia download available," which is around a few weeks old, so it might not be able to help if you're searching for something later than that. However, the company plans to update this in the future, as well as add more sources for DuckAssist to draw from.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it just got "Aier". Don't ask me to define that. Go Google it, I mean Bing it, I mean Duck It!
Get over it! I admit it now! (Score:1)
I admit it now, I was wrong! I lost the troll war and declared trolls the victors. I apologized for posting ads and deleted my creepy ebooks. I was wrong. You were right.
I was posting for no reason other than to include monetized links to Amazon.
I was going through a lot at the time and became unreasonably defiant when I was caught and asked to stop. I told my trolls to come after me but had no idea they'd be so persistent. I was wrong, my trolls were right. I apologize. I will never do it again.
I sincerely
Duck, duck? (Score:5, Funny)
Should have named it "Foie gras". Force fed crap and then served to the masses as a delicacy.
AI content is incredibly low quality (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found multiple articles online that after reading through them I realized the information was not correct. What's scary is the first few paragraphs made sense, but once it drilled into some esoteric details it was completely wrong. I poked around on the site and it had hundreds of articles on unrelated topics but all fit the same form. AI generated content is like having Wikipedia summarized to you by a moron. AI-generated content is really anti-content.
Is there a lot of potential for AI? Clearly. Are people deploying AI to make quick money with zero oversight and zero quality control? Absolutely.
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I'm worried that DDG is in trouble. When tech companies start running out of money they often turn to the latest fad. AI, crypto currency...
Re:AI content is incredibly low quality (Score:4)
It seems these natural-language-search neural nets present you with all the pitfalls of finding information online, but layered up with an additional point of failure: the "AI" itself. And it seems the neural nets have all sorts of weird failure modes, and tend towards giving you garbage that looks good and authoritative. That's a particularly shitty way to fail for the average user who will take whatever they're given at face value and trust the computer. Think of the guy that obeys the little GPS voice when it sends him into a dead-end dumpster alley, or to cut across 4 lanes to an exit that he's already perpendicular to.
What the tech companies are saying about AI is highly unusual. "We need regulation. Please regulate us. It's very important, in fact, we're going to pause development for 6 months just to give you more time to figure out how." That kind of talk has never come out of their mouths before, and now all of them are saying it in unison? Something has them scared.
It's the inevitable wave of scams that will be unleashed on the world soon with this chat bot tech. It's most suited to grifting, where sounding good/"correct" is the main thing. One scammer will now have 1,000 scambots working for him. All online avenues are going to be flooded with them, to the point it will be obvious, even to normies. They will point the finger at these tech companies. So they're trying to mitigate the PR disaster in advance, by calling for regulation.
Switching gears a bit... There's a Schoolhouse Rock segment from the 80s called Scooter Computer & Mister Chips. [youtube.com] It's shocking how relevant it is to the recent developments, and it dips its toes into the philosophy of sentience. Anyone freaking out about how smart ChatGPT is, worrying it's going to turn on us, should watch this. The explanations within are fundamental, true, and completely applicable to today's LLM situation. (At 3 minutes, it's highly worth watching.)
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You're right here. AI can only generate something that "looks good" to a human, but has no way to verify facts. Anything it gets correct is incidental.
I recently stumbled upon a YouTube channel that contains hundreds of AI-generated summaries of books, read by a computer-generated voice. I listened to a summary of a science fiction novel that I just finished reading and while it started out making sense, it ended up being completely wrong. The summary even went so far as to mention characters that weren't i
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Humans can have a concept of truth, because they can verify things by physical contact with the real world.
AI can only reference electronic information. It has no ultimate hard reference. We can do physics experiments, or die in multi-vehicle pile ups.
AI cannot tell the difference between Newton's laws of motion and Trump's ramblings. Sure it can "ask Siri" to help out. Well, its not going to help out.
"Ye canna break th
Porn (Score:3)
All I use DDG for is porn...so that my dirty, nasty searches don't pollute the browser I normally use.
I wonder what AI based porn searches would look like, and whether they include only AI generated porn results?!?
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Re: Porn (Score:2)
Re: Porn (Score:3)
Better: Star-nosed mole pron!
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No thank you, but (Score:5, Insightful)
I would very much like the ability to exclude keywords from a search.
Even better if I could AND and OR keywords with parentesis in the search, or straight up limited SQL queries.
Re:No thank you, but (Score:5, Informative)
Older search engines used to offer more options like this, but it seems it wasn't used enough to justify keeping or cloning such features.
> I would very much like the ability to exclude keywords from a search.
Google still accepts the minus sign to a degree. For example, entering "Big Bang Theory -TV" gives you more science sites than without (emphasizing the TV show).
And putting quotes around a word or phrase is almost like an AND. Thus, Google still has "soft Boolean" options.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm surprised Google doesn't have an Advance Search button below the input box that has more prompting, something like:
Must contain at least one of these words[1]: _________
Must contain all of these words: __________
Exclude content with these words: ____________
[Search button]
[1] words or phrases, where phrases are indicated via quotes, ex: "country girl".
Operators (Score:3)
Bing (Score:2)
However (Score:1)
Their search engine? (Score:2)
Opposite of useful (Score:3)
When I do a search, I don't want a 5000 word college English essay on the subject. I just want a list of hits on answers.