Episode Details

Curious how people voted? Head to VoteYesOrNoAI.com

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Kamyl: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode you’ll hear from the employees about our product vision, product updates, engineering, approach to AI, et cetera. I’m Kamyl Bazbaz, SVP for communications and policy at DuckDuckGo. Today I’m with Mary McGee, one of our senior brand directors and I’m very excited to talk about something that we worked on together, which is our Yes AI No AI campaign that just launched. Mary, do you want to introduce yourself and then we’ll start talking about the campaign.

Mary: Yeah. Hi, Kamyl. Great intro. So good. I, like Kamyl said, I work on brand here at DuckDuckGo. I’ve been here about six years and I’ve worked on everything from our homepage to onboarding to messaging, all basically, how does it feel to use DuckDuckGo? How does it feel to use the product? What are we trying to communicate to you, our users and the types of conversations we’re looking to have? So I’m excited to talk about this one. It’s a sort of a new effort on our side, which hopefully we’ll see a lot more of.

Kamyl: That’s right. So I guess let’s let’s start from the basics. What is the no yes campaign and what are we asking people to do?

Mary: Yep. So this is our live public vote on AI and where it came from. Actually, it started probably back over the summer. So, you know, a lot of users will know that we’ve had a version of our search engine, noai.duckduckgo.com for maybe the past six months. And we built it as we were building our AI tools because something that was really important to us was that AI be optional. And that actually, comes from this sort of long history of DuckDuckGo really prioritizing user choice and wanting to let users decide how and when and how much, you know, you’ll notice that throughout all of our products. But when it came to NoAI, we noticed that there was something to this. There was, was, you know, it was getting used, people were talking about it. And it kind of sparked this conversation of like, you know, we believe optionality is, you know, inherent in good technology and letting users make that choice. But we noticed with AI, people really aren’t being given that choice. It’s like every time you see, you got a new email about a new feature or a new product, they talk about their new AI integration. And there’s no talk about how to turn it off. There’s no talk about, you were asking for it, here it is. There’s this sort of like, there’s this real gap between user demand and what companies were releasing. And so, like I mentioned, when we were thinking about AI, we were thinking about useful, private, optional, and there’s something about optional that really stuck out. So that’s where this campaign came from. What we wanted to do was actually ask, a thing that tech companies don’t often do, actually ask people, hey, where do you stand on AI? What is your take? What do you want? And we asked in really a simple way because for us, we sort of can help you eithe