DuckDuckGo offers "anonymous" access to AI chatbots through new service

[LearnedHand]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/06/duckduckgo-offers-anonymous-access-to-ai-chatbots-through-new-service/

For the AI-curious: DDG's offering seems like a moderately cyber- and privacy-safe way to noodle around with chat clients. You can select from several popular chat clients. I asked it to quiz me in the language I'm learning. It was fun.

On Thursday, DuckDuckGo unveiled a new "AI Chat" service that allows users to converse with four mid-range large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral in an interface similar to ChatGPT while attempting to preserve privacy and anonymity. While the AI models involved can output inaccurate information readily, the site allows users to test different mid-range LLMs without having to install anything or sign up for an account.

DuckDuckGo's AI Chat currently features access to OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, and two open source models, Meta's Llama 3 and Mistral's Mixtral 8x7B. The service is currently free to use within daily limits. Users can access AI Chat through the DuckDuckGo search engine, direct links to the site, or by using "!ai" or "!chat" shortcuts in the search field. AI Chat can also be disabled in the site's settings for users with accounts.

According to DuckDuckGo, chats on the service are anonymized, with metadata and IP address removed to prevent tracing back to individuals. The company states that chats are not used for AI model training, citing its privacy policy and terms of use.

"We have agreements in place with all model providers to ensure that any saved chats are completely deleted by the providers within 30 days," says DuckDuckGo, "and that none of the chats made on our platform can be used to train or improve the models."

[usonian]

1. In other words, the information is untrustworthy when you need it to be accurate.

If you have to check it anyway, why bother?

As DuckDuckGo itself states in its privacy policy, "By its very nature, AI Chat generates text with limited information. As such, Outputs that appear complete or accurate because of their detail or specificity may not be. For example, AI Chat cannot dynamically retrieve information and so Outputs may be outdated. You should not rely on any Output without verifying its contents using other sources, especially for professional advice (like medical, financial, or legal advice)."

The polluting of the web is making it not only useless, but dangerous.
Wikipedia and a handful of other sites (that I'm still searching for) are usually accurate (but with the same disclaimer, throw in education, engineering, home repairs, cooking (with glue? ) and other disciplines)

[LearnedHand]

2. I get that

For the most part, the ai chat tools and other generative ai were released while Congress had its collective fingers up its collective ass. I.e., no protection from scammers and unsavory political operatives for thee and me. But in the business environment, I've seen folks do amazing dances with ai, like writing code for example.

This DDG capability protects the casual user from the intrusive invasions of privacy. I.e., use ChatGPT 3.5 in the DDG tool, and your prompts don't train the client or go to OpenAI. I found it mildly useful to practice a foreign language. It also had some interesting (if somewhat shallow) references for planning trips.