While the whole industry races to cram artificial intelligence into every search box, something opposite and far more interesting is happening: millions of people are looking for a way to turn it off. The search engine DuckDuckGo has just released add-ons for Chrome and Firefox that make its no-AI version the default - no generated answers, no chat windows, no artificial images in the results. And users are flocking to it.

The numbers speak for themselves. Visits to the no-AI page jumped by about 30 percent in a week, installations in the US by over 18 percent, and on May 28 traffic to that page tripled. On average, visits are about 84 percent above usual - and they're not dropping, which means it's not a passing wave but a change of habit.

Where did this come from? From Google. When the tech giant redesigned search in May so that AI summaries pushed the classic links into the background, many realised they were no longer searching - they were being served a ready-made answer, with no way to judge for themselves where it comes from. And a ready-made answer with no source is exactly what a smart user doesn't trust.

The irony is that DuckDuckGo isn't an "anti-AI" company - it has its own chatbot and subscriptions with advanced models. The point isn't that artificial intelligence is bad, but that someone decided it should be mandatory, without asking. And when something is forced on you as the only option, it's always worth asking who it suits for things to be that way.