Postcards From Across the Pond

AI isn’t really coming, it’s already here, and it has been for some time. AI was first studied by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in 1943 and has steadily moved forward since. And you’ve been using it for years without noticing, or even thinking, about it.

What? Did you think when you Googled, “Is Mona Lisa really a man?” that some guy named Nigel was sitting in an office in Kettering looking at your request and painstakingly returning related websites to your PC?

What you’re seeing now isn’t the birth of AI, but AI’s stroppy teenage years, where it wants to break free and be independent but its parents are being real assholes about it so it sulks around the Interweb sending your children YouTube videos on How to Top Yourself and Where to Buy Illegal Vapes (same thing, really) and helping other stroppy teenagers draw cock and balls on the Mona Lisa.

I have already written about my brushes with AI, and how it has failed me, but despite my efforts to ignore it, AI continues to disappoint. Its latest—unasked for and unwanted—insinuation into my life arrived with Google Search. In the course of my day, I use Google a great deal, for research, fact-checking, helping me spell tricky words, etc. It is handy, unobtrusive, and reliable.

Over the past few days, however, I noticed a change. The simple search (which worked fine, by the way) has been upgraded to, one must suppose, something better, because it uses AI. As mentioned above, it always did use AI, but now they are making a song and dance about it, and I find that highly annoying.

Annoying I can put up with, so I did. But then I tried to copy and paste something from the results page. I highlighted the text I wanted, copied it, then attempted to paste it. And nothing happened. I repeated this several times and, thinking it must have been a fluke, I moved on. But then it happened again, and again, and again: if I found something using Google, I was unable to copy it and paste it into my document.

This did not make Google annoying, it made it patently useless, leaving me to wonder what I could possibly do about it.

As it happened, that very evening, I saw a TV advert for Duck Duck Go, a new, upcoming (they hope) browser and search engine. (It really wasn’t much of a coincidence; I’d been seeing their ads for weeks.) They were Free, Fast, and Private, promising—unlike Chrome and MS Edge—to never, never track you. I didn’t mind being lied to like that (Not track me? Yeah, right!) and I had hopes that, unlike Google, I might be able to search for something and then be able to copy and paste it. I was right.

(Full disclosure: when preparing this article, I attempted to recreate the non-copy issue but was unsuccessful. I swear to you it did happen, but this no longer seems to be the case. Whether it was a bug they fixed or a feature they discovered was not popular, it no longer happens—to me at least—but it happened long enough to put me off.)

I’ve been using Duck Duck Go for a week now and I notice no difference except it searches without the annoying “I’m using AI, isn’t that wonderful!” bullshit, and it allows me to copy what I find.

This is not an unpaid ad for Duck Duck Go. You do you, but if you are tired of MS Edge and Google and being tracked wherever you go (Hey, what are you doing on that website? Does your mother know what you’re looking at?) you might give it a try.

Fair warning: one of its coolest features is the Flame Icon. If you click it, it will close all open tabs, erase the data, and clear your cache. And it displays a nifty, animated graphic while doing it.

Trouble is, when I did it, I had to log back in to MS Mail, my Google Calendar, and Google Keep, so be aware.