An ok at best stop-gap measure to reduce the annoying anti-features currently being forced on users by every single website to woo venture capitalist investors drunk on marketing copy from trillionaire companies hemorrhaging billions selling a fundamentally unprofitable and useless product whilst promising all of those things will soon change, citing vague rumours of "massive changes just around the corner" and making silly comparisons to popular fictional computer AIs.

The "AI" nonsense should really be opt-in rather than opt-out.

Especially since it's very easy to forget to install the addon or opt out on every new browser install and have an unwanted "answer" generated at you, wasting time and electricity for no good reason while there's a climate crisis we're all fully aware of, while every country's power grid is still mostly powered by fossil fuels, where every offsetting of green energy however minimal serves to increase the impact of said crisis one drop in the bucket at a time, while also creating unnecessary irritation at the reminder that this garbage dead end technology still exists, and that some people apparently think a chatbot that quotes nonsense pseudo-answers Frankensteined together out of probabilistic linguistic token matches trained off non-consensually scraped fiction materials and social media posts from *social media users* who are already notorious for parroting misinformation and biased misconceptions, drowning out the comparatively minuscule number of experts, is better than just reading a paragraph long Wikipedia instant answer typed by an actual person who more likely knows what they're actually talking about...

But more to the point, the extension just adds a search engine to the browser and switches the default instead of requiring users to add a custom link. It doesn't, for example, redirect duckduckgo searches from other programs opening tabs in-browser to the no-ai version, which require an additional add-on for redirection that DDG do not provide.

The extension also does not work on mobile browsers, and the noai.duckduckgo site has to be manually set as a custom search engine even if the extension is installed or synced from a desktop browser.