At least here, they are specifically training it on just educational public sources. Seems like a respectable usage of the tech.
DuckAssist answers questions by scanning a specific set of sources — for now that’s usually Wikipedia, and occasionally related sites like Britannica — using DuckDuckGo’s active indexing. Because we’re using natural language technology from OpenAI and Anthropic to summarize what we find in Wikipedia, these answers should be more directly responsive to your actual question than traditional search results or other Instant Answers.
If you enter a question that can be answered by Wikipedia into our search box, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to anonymously generate a brief, sourced summary of what it finds in Wikipedia — right above our regular private search results.
The model is still trained on a broad corpus like ChatGPT3, i.e., the Internet. The corpus of Wikipedia alone probably isn't enough training data.