Dia (Browser)

★★☆☆☆

I haven’t decided whether Dia is an AI chatbot masquerading as a web browser or the other way around.

For now it’s in closed beta (and only on M-series Macs), but they’ve released it to anyone with an Arc Browser account. Not wanting to run it on my primary OS or log into any important accounts (Dia will look through your logged-in accounts for answers), I installed it on a virtual machine.

First impression: it really wants you to personalize it. And it really wants you to interact by chatting. Once it gets past the onboarding, the main window is a 50/50 split with the web view in one column and chat in the other. And they’ve finally implemented the UI change that big tech has been trying to do for the last 15 years: Hide the URLs. I spent several seconds looking for a place to type in the name of a website before I decided to type it in the “Ask anything” box, and was relieved that it works like Arc and I could pick the actual site from a drop-down.

But Why, Though?

The problem is that I don’t want to interact with the web through an AI chat bot.

I’ve tried. I really liked Arc Search, but I never warmed to its AI features either.

I just don’t want a generated answer that won’t tell me where to find more details, and won’t cite its sources. (I asked it why it doesn’t cite its sources, and it said it will if it has to do a web search, but not if it’s just using its training data.) And I don’t want a folksy-sounding “well, I can’t find an exact answer, but I can tell you sort of where to look for it,” I want to go to that place where I can find it.

I also don’t trust the technology yet: I don’t trust its accuracy. I don’t trust the people running it. I don’t trust the way summaries will entrench a single interpretation (just like classifying AI tends to reinforce the biases in its training data). And so much of it still relies on cloud services, meaning that your questions and answers are routed through another layer of remote computers, which need more energy and provide a nice central spot for surveillance. (This is also why I’ve avoided voice assistants for so long.) If I go directly to EFF.org, that’s between me and the EFF, but if I use Dia’s AI chat to get answers from EFF, Dia’s and OpenAI’s servers need access too. And while Dia assures you that your query is deleted immediately afterward, you have to trust them on it. And trust anyone who might eventually buy them.

And that’s not even getting into AI’s rapidly expanding energy requirements coming just at the point when the world was getting a handle on renewables, or the ethics of sourcing its training data.

Bottom (Command) Line

AI integration is the whole point of Dia. Without those features, it’s just a stripped-down Chromium browser, and not a very compelling one, either. (I’d go back to Arc or Ecosia in a heartbeat, or DuckDuckGo, and those are the comparatively bland ones. And Ecosia at least tries to work for the environment.) With the AI, it’s another panopticon funnel.

Maybe it’s just not my thing, or I’m just being a digital curmudgeon. (Maybe.) Though it is kind of funny that people are interacting with computers by typing text commands to get responses again. Of course, terminal applications are (usually) more deterministic about what you get back from them!