Even though I am a data scientist, and I work closely with AI-based tools, I always thought this tools should only be used, when absolutely needed…which doesn’t mean every single search results page.
Doesn’t matter if you use Google, DuchDuckGo, Brave Search or Ecosia (tho their AI summary is more sustainable), you’ll get a summary of the results wether you want it or not. If that’s something you can get by without, I have great news for you!
The popular (but non-stable) solution
The most popular option for Google is using the „-ai” extra parameter. The problem with it is that you have to always and it is far from being reliable, as multiple users reported that this method sometimes didn’t work. You can add another parameter to the seach URL, but that would again: require you to do that manually…
The working solution
There is a wonderful extransion, called Disable AI (Chrome, Firefox)
This is an extremely versatile option, as the official description says: it can „Disable Google’s AI Overview, DuckDuckGo’s AI Assist, Ecosia’s AI Overview, Brave Search’s Answer with AI, and Qwant’s AI Flash Answer”. The real goal of the extension is to disable the outbound request to an AI service (because hiding the results would result in the summary not showing up, but still consuming water).
It is wonderful, and as I use an extension config for firefox (inspired by CachyOS’ firefox-pure config), I always add this one to the list. I just love it, small, simple, but with a noble goal!
The motivation
To be honest, all search engines are good enough to provide you the accurate answers to your query, and 99% of the time, I find the summary unnecessary…If its that 1%, I use a search-focused service, like Perplexity. So really, apart from using a ton of water unnecessarily, there is nothing AI summaries do for me…
You could argue, that one person disabling AI summary will result in nothing, but I believe even 1000-2000 people using a tool like this would make a huge change and trust me, there are way more people, who’d gladly disable AI summary to save some water.
Wrapping up
To sum it all up, if you’re conscious about AI’s footprint and want to do a convenient, but important step towards sustainability, I recommend downloading Disable AI enough! You sacrifice almost no convenience, but can save a lot of water on the long run, helping regulate the huge environmental impact the emergence of AI has on our planet.
It is open source, so everyone can check out the source code: GitHub repository
