Fuck AI

In truth, people have a visceral reaction because the world is trending in a way they don't like, and it has the unfortunate effect that companies that do what these people like the most, or more than other companies, end up the most punished because those people are the most likely to give backlash. This results in them losing and things being even worse.

Right now there are barely any AI integrations in Firefox, so people are just kneejerk overreacting. At worse they have a feature you have to try to hit where you can have the AI LLM provider of choice summarize a page for you and that type of thing.

For me, I see it I the sidebar on regular ff but I disable it every time.

Nice tip. I'll check some of these search engine for sure 👌.

To be fair to DDG, you can permanently disable all ads and AI in their settings, or use a URL parameter to disable them in private browsing. They also block any embedded trackers in the ads they serve. Still not great, but leagues better than Google or Bing

And no, DDG is not a friend. Besides having their own LLM-bot, they also still have microsoft ads fuckery going on.

At some point with this level of purity testing, you will just be hurting yourself, and making the people around you annoyed though.

You basically want companies to exist while not being profitable for idealistic reasons.

You'll say you don't of course, but the collection of people like you all have similar but different enough red flags that the end result is that you who care idealistically end up having basically 0 effect on the market except making any company that tries to appeal to you walk on egg shells to the point they fail or give up and go for a broader audience.

I mean, I personally wouldn't mind paying 50 bucks a year for a proper open source, well maintained browser, but that will never happen because the type of person like me, also is probably pretty nitpicky, and tends to have ridiculous things they consider as red flags even if they could just ignore a feature or disable it, and that would mean there is no common paid browser possible.

We are then back to there being free browsers that have many reasons to be hated but that the common person is fine enough with.

You're right, just tested. Post the issue here.

https://github.com/jruns/disable-ai/issues

Ecosia We disable Ecosia's AI Overview by blocking the AI Overview data request to their API. We also hide the AI Chat tab under the search bar.

You can turn off AI overviews in Ecosia's settings, and uBlock Origin's element picker can block the AI search button.

Alternatively, DuckDuckGo lets you entirely disable everything AI and even block search results that are known to be AI-generated. Pretty much the main reason I still use it