That's not a great comparison, as privacy-focused search engines do exist (Kagi, DDG to an extent, et al.). And you can still use mainstream search engines with frontends like SearX. Most of my privacy concerns are with adtech corporations tying my search terms to my profile, that they later sell to advertisers, and whoever else on shady data broker markets. I don't want to be complicit with my data being exploited to later manipulate me, nor do I want to make them money in exchange of a "free" service.

These are partly the same reasons I don't voluntarily use proprietary services at all. I don't want to train someone else's model, nor help them build a profile on me. Even if they're not involved in adtech—a rarity nowadays—you have no guarantees of how this data will be used in the future.

For AI tools, there's currently no alternative. Large corporations are building silos around their models, and by using their services you're giving them perpetual access to your inputs. Even if they later comply with data protection laws and allow you to delete your profile, they won't "untrain" their models, so your data is still in there somewhere. Considering that we're currently talking about 32,000 tokens worth of input, and soon people uploading their whole codebases to it, that's an unprecedented amount of data they can learn from, instead of what they can gather from web search terms. No wonder adtech is salivating at opening up the firehose for you to feed them even more data.

The use cases of AI tools are also different, and more personal. While we use search engines for looking things up on the web, and some personal information can be extracted from that, LLMs are used in a conversational way, and often involve much more personal information. It's an entirely different ballpark of privacy concerns.