Anybody else bothered by the Kagi pledge "to contribute 5% of our profits to the following [political] organizations that align with our mission of humanizing the web"? [1]
The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it.
Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them.
To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations.
How do they square this mission statement with AI summaries and content-vectorized chat bots? are the summaries going to be so long and bad on purpose you are still forced to click though occasionally? just so the possibly human web site runner feels glee.
>AI should be used to support users, not replace them
Doesn't square. AI doesn't replace your users? it threatens to replace your content creators. You treat users as smart enough to assess every webpage you send them to but too dumb to assess the outputs of emergent LLMs. Both are text on a screen.
Refusing to serve juicy steak because babies can't chew them or because there is 20 years of dried beef jerky in reserve to sell first.
Then don't click the AI summary button? Its not required. Kagi specifically says their search will always work without the AI features, and will always work without javascript.
The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it.
Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them.
To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html