DuckDuckGo Is Hoping to Win Over AI-Hating Searchers

Are you tired of AI-generated images cluttering your search results? Lucky for you, there’s a way out of the slop, and it starts with forgetting about Google. 

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine and web browser, recently rolled out a new feature that allows users to hide images made with AI from their search results. 

You can try it yourself right now by running a search on the DuckDuckGo search engine and going to the images tab. You’ll now see a new drop-down menu option titled “AI Images” that can be toggled to hide or show AI images. 

“Our goal is to help you find what you’re looking for. You should decide for yourself how much AI you want in your life – or if you want any at all,” the company said in an announcement posted on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). 

The company’s filter uses open-source blocklists to screen out the AI-generated images. Although it won’t catch everything, it should significantly cut down the number of AI images in search results.

The news comes as AI slop has been proliferating at an exponential rate. And while it’s, at the very least, an eyesore, the bigger concern is how convincingly real these images are becoming. There has even been debate whether AI images should be watermarked by default to make them easier to spot. But, some argue that if the watermarks are easy to remove, they could backfire and give some AI-generated images a false sense of authenticity. 

Android Authority reported last week that OpenAI is already testing a watermark feature for images generated in the beta version of ChatGPT’s Android app. Additionally, the site speculates that the ability to save images without a watermark might be granted to paid users. However, since the feature hasn’t been officially announced, its final form, or whether it launches at all, could still change.

DuckDuckGo launched in 2008 and now offers web browsers on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Its browsers come full with several privacy features, including blocking third-party trackers, stopping targeted ads (even on YouTube), and it doesn’t track searches. The company says it makes money from private ads on its search engine.

Although the company puts an emphasis on online privacy, it is not necessarily anti-AI. In its announcement of its AI image filter, the company said its philosophy for AI features is that they should be “private, useful, and optional.”

The company already offers several AI features, including Duck.ai, which lets users access custom versions of popular models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral, while keeping their conversations anonymous and untracked.

In fact, the company announced today that users can now customize how those models respond, adjusting tone, length, and even what “role” the model takes when replying.