Comment by giwook

While there is a meaningful subset of the population that will do this, I wonder if the vast majority of people, even if they share the same negative sentiment towards AI and in particular how Google is pushing it in their products, will find the friction in changing up their workflows and routines to be too much to actually change things up.

While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs.

Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off).

And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).