Episode Details

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder & CEO) introduces our vision for AI and speaks with Rachel (front-end team) about our newly released AI image filter.

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Show notes: See the full post on our approach to AI — private, useful, and optional.

GabrielHello, hello everybody. Welcome to DuckTales. This is our series where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo. I'm the founder of DuckDuckGo. I have Rachel here who works at our company. Hi, Rachel.

RachelHi!

GabrielSo, DuckTales is really about discussing the technology we use, the people working on it, how we're building privacy tools. We hope you'll join us. You'll hear about all aspects of DuckDuckGo essentially.

Today, we are talking about AI a bit and in particular a feature that we recently released that allows you to filter out AI generated images on our search results. Taking a step back, our approach to AI is, we wrote a whole post on this if you want to check it out, maybe we can figure out how to put things in show notes.

But three things: private, useful, and optional. So private kind of goes without saying, that's what we do at DuckDuckGo. But with AI in particular. You know, we're focused on, you know, Rachel, you know this, so just saying this for everybody else listening. We're focused on keeping it anonymous and also not training on your data. And then useful is we're really trying to make AI tools that are actually useful, not just for the sake of using them, but...so they're actually useful. So on the search engine, you know, we have answers now at the top that kind of help you figure out what you're trying to look for without having to click through a lot of results. Although you're welcome to, of course, and the sources are clearly labeled there. But the third pillar is optional. So not everybody wants to use AI. We realize that.

And so we've been approaching it by making everything optional. And so you can turn off those answers at the top of the search engine. You can turn off our chat product, Duck.ai, which brings us to the AI image filter, which is a little different type of feature because it's not something that we're doing generation of images, although we're probably going to end up doing that sometime. It's more in that optional camp, taking AI away if you really would like to. You want to explain it a little bit?

RachelYeah, so the AI Image Filter, actually let me just share my screen so I can quickly demo it as we talk about it. So the AI Image Filter is a feature you can find on our image filter bar. So up here, this is the filter here. And you can also find this feature on our user settings page. But yeah, it's literally what the name suggests.

A filter that filters out AI-generated images. At a high level, you can put in a query. And if we detect that you've enabled the feature, then our images service is going to do some basic pattern matching against a block list that we have and return the filtered results.

The list itself is actually from an open sourc