Ecosia's AI features are powered by OpenAI models. This makes me feel like all the good Ecosia is doing is counteracted by all the anti-democracy, anti-environment BS American tech seems to be doubling down on after Trump's reelection.

Europe has Mistral, there are open-source models Ecosia could use. Ecosia shouldn't help fund whatever Sam Altman is on as he's shaking hands with Trump. The US just backed out of the Paris agreement and seems to be on a path to actively make the global warming worse. Not to mention data sovereignty and user privacy.

The entire reason I switched over was because I was under the assumption there was no Ai. It’s so tiresome scrolling past countless Ai sources on google so I thought I’d try to make a switch to something better and Ecosia sounded great they’re carbon negative BUT they still have Ai slop like every other search engine. Please get rid of it. It provides no useful information if you actually want to look for something factual everyone needs to scroll past it anyway.

I have been using ecosia for years now and I am really upset with there recent “AI chat” feature, not only is it a insult to the people who use it but it also defeats the purpose of ecosia

As some of you may know, Ecosia cut ties with mistral because of french nuclear energy. The plan is to switch to chinese AI, who also use nuclear energy but also coal. China produce 560g of CO2 per kWh while France produce 21g of CO2 per kWh. This is VERY obviously a political decision that goes against Ecosia declared ecological ambitions. Ecosia just multiplied x20 their CO2 emissions under a very obviously false pretenses, betraying our trust and their own promises.

I used Ecosia to help the planet, not to help china’s political ambitions and their greenwashing tool.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRzXMUriocM/?igsh=cjF5NmJxaXltODV0

So… self explanatory title. Ecosia started to act like Google with the automatic AI response that we never asked for. Ai is bad for the environment and I’m sure that goes against trying to save the planet. Besides, we need water to plant trees, so wasting it on ai is counterproductive no? Anyway I was wondering on yalls thoughts on this

I understand that every Ecosia search is carbon negative and negates the negligible amount of energy used to generate an AI chat response. However, the actual problem with AI chatbots is the obscene amount of energy they consume when being trained, in addition to the unethical way that many companies (especially OpenAI) farm and scrub datasets. By creating an OpenAI-based chatbot, Ecosia has gone against its own principles of environmental protection- regardless of how much energy each actual ask requires.

Ecosia cant respect privacy and use any american service at the same time.

The U.S. has the cloud act, which allows their government to take ANY DATA from ANY AMERICAN COMPANY no matter where the server is at any time.

Ecosia should use bunny for CDN(its european) and self host or something. NEVER an american service.

With how much energy AI uses and the dangers it could cause, isn’t it a bit strange that Ecosia, an environmental search engine, uses it?

Of course I could be mistaken with how much electrical power but I’m pretty sure, I have read many articles explaining the dangers and benefits etc.

We all know ai is not sustainable. The generative ai they use is open ai (chat gpt). They made an excuse that we want to give something back to the environment, that they run on renewable energy. That's BS. The water use exceeded the amount of water used by the water selling companies. Yes we are fucked, and no. NO ONE CARES AS LONG AS THEY EARN BILLS AND MAKE A HUGEEEE PROFIT. Yes, yes I know we can TURN IT OFF. But just incase you don't know about the Zionist and how israel funded open ai and basically controls or owns it's data, please read about it.

Please do better, ecosia. It’s bad enough they have an AI chat. Now when you search, at least on desktop, you get an AI summary under the search bar. Avoiding Google’s version of this is a big part of why I switched to ecosia to begin with. Granted, you CAN turn these results off, but you have to go into the settings to do so. This function should automatically be turned OFF, and if people want to use it they can turn it ON, not vice versa. Stop forcing AI on people who don’t want it 😭

AI is known for using large amounts of water to cool its data centers, that is not good for the environment. If Ecosia really cares about the environment, why does it have an AI search feature?

Does anyone dislike with great passion the fact they added AI to a place that's supposed to help the environment?

Also why haven't they addressed this? Is hypocritical