Oof
Copying a comment I made from another thread:
If you select “No” it gives you an option to go to an alternate DDG homepage “noai.duckduckgo.com”. But it looks like if you just go to their normal homepage, they’ve got a link to DuckAI at the top, searching for images defaults to including AI images, and they have a Search Assist that uses AI as well.
So even though the overwhelming majority of their users have responded “No AI”, they’re still defaulting everyone to the “Yes AI” experience unless you use an alternate URL. That’s kind of shitty. I mean at least they have a “no” option, but seems like it should be the default.
Well, this is incredibly recent. Yeah, they fucked up with following stupid trends, but I like the acknowledgement
I am utterly unsure whether my opinion is that this is a Stockholm/bootlick/appeasement type sentiment or not. Like not even trying to be oppositional because I actually sort of feel the same way.
That’s kind of shitty. I mean at least they have a “no” option, but seems like it should be the default.
What’s frustrating is that all browsers default to the “Yes AI” version when you pick DDG as the default search engine. So if you have a privacy browser that periodically dumps your cookies, the AI keeps getting turned on.
This wouldn’t be a problem if DDG just made it fucking opt-in from the start instead of opt-out. Hopefully with the poll they’ll finally make the right choice and fix it
Yes, you can define your own search engine on firefox though. Just type in the no ai link of ddg and the search parameter.
Yeah, in a sane world with a good company what 93% of users want will be the default.
Got a big ass laugh out of this
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Nobody actually posted the link to the poll?
It is the article, to be fair.
Yes, at the very bottom though.
It’s at 93% against AI right now, I hope they take it into consideration and make it opt in
Well, for now, it seems we pretty much all feel the same way
Now we’ll see where in the enshittification pipeline they are by whether or not they listen to their users.
This is probably the 4th or 5th post I’ve seen on Lemmy about this poll this week. Each time I checked the results, they were the same (except for the very first one I saw, which was different by only one percentage point.) The answer’s pretty clear.
Although I’m pretty sure it’s a PR stunt at this point, I do appreciate that DDG asked its users at all. Every other company seems to be like, “We’re gonna make you use AI, regardless of whether you want to or not. Suck it up!”
Unsurprising results. It’s very rare to see support for AI anywhere expect some niche subreddits or Linkedin. Usually any whiff of AI is immediately downvoted
I wish they were more clear on this. Is this about existing AI features? Future AI features? AI images?
My only real complaint is that I would prefer it to never show the AI answer by default, I would just like to see the button to get the AI answer. And to be clear, I know I can set DDG to behave that way, but I do a lot of searches in private tabs too.
I actually do find the AI summary helpful maybe like half the time. When it comes to basic programming questions, like to remind me of syntax or arguments, it gives a useful answer most of the time.
But I don’t want to see AI images. And I’m hesitant to agree to future AI features because of how aggressively some companies push them in your face.
I think it’s great and really straightforward. it’s quite simply asking people to say yes or no to AI, and the response has been overwhelmingly no.
Even then, what do you consider AI?
Some people don’t even consider LLMs to be AI because they don’t consider them smart enough and or because they lack sentience.
Before LLMs, machine learning has been considered “AI”. DDG/Bing likely uses machine learning for their page rankings, are they going to stop that because this poll said no to AI?
The poll is just too vague with what AI means. When people say they hate AI nowadays, they typically don’t literally mean that. They really mean they hate how things like how LLMs are shoved into services that don’t need them, tech bros non-nonchalantly talking about replacing humans entirely, environmental impact of LLMs, people using LLMs for too many things, etc. Outside of stuff like that, there’s plenty of good uses of “AI”.
AI as in the ubiquitous multicultural definition that had been used by corporations worldwide for multiple years.
It is a disingenuous use of ‘AI’ for the reasons you give, but it is virtually the only colloquial use of the acronym in worldwide culture. It is very clear what it means, especially in the context of a search engine company asking it.
i just really fucking hope they stop rewriting search result descriptions with ai slop that’s nothing like what the site actually contains. also happens on noai version, probably because it’s how bing serves them but still.
There’s nothing wrong with ai. It’s a tool. It’s nice to have access to more tools.
The only problem with AI is how it’s being forced on everyone and it’s taking away consumer access to technology.
It’s a VERY specific tool that needs
- a lot, like World scale, amount of data and that has repetitively been done WITHOUT permissions from authors of that data
- huge amount of data must be processed and this is done in enormous datacenters that consume radically MORE than traditional ones without GPUs
- energy and cooling for those very specific new datacenters that then becomes unavailable to the local community, energy produced that is often rushed and typically more polluting
So I think it is fundamental to distinguish
- “AI” as a theoretical researcher field, public research focusing on processing CERN data, weather forecast, genomics, medicine, etc that is indeed a tool that might produce results that helps us all
versus
- commercialized for-profit “AI” with GenAI and LLMs as blackboxes mostly used for spam, scan, low quality code, etc.
When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.
My biggest problem with AI is that currently it is a very shitty tool that outputs nonsense 9 out of 10 times while big tech pretends it is totally awesome, which like you say, makes it being forced on you even more frustrating.
Is it here to stay? Yes I believe so. But it needs a lot of work in a lot of area’s to be truly useful.
I feel like you must be prompting it poorly or using ChatGPT / Copilot?
I’d say in my day to day, AI tooling successfully tackles 90% of my software engineering jobs and with proper context and promoting the output is pretty stellar.
Assuming you’re maintaining a big codebase and not just producing boilerplate, do you find LLMs to be more help than language servers/IDE code snippets?
That’s one of the problems.
The other problem is that the billionaires want to use AI to make censorship and kill decisions (see Palantir) to lock up their olygarchy.
Nice advertising campaign for DDG. But I really respect search engines that do give you a choice whether to use AI or not, and decide other options under their hood. So good for them.
Exactly. This is the worst kind of corporate “In these trying times, we care” theatre. I expected better from DDG.
Poorly scoped, poorly defined, taps into vague “AI = Bad!” fears.
What exactly am I voting on here? Vibes?
This doesn’t increase my trust index for DDG. If anything, it makes me wonder about DDGs agenda.
Very Veridian Dynamics, DDG.
Fail.
PS: Self host SearXNG > DDG
What I would love from DDG is a search option that removes those crappy AI generated websites that fill 90% of results nowadays. Ironically, they would have to use some kind of use AI to do it (classifiers)
100%. Products and services that can filter out Ai slop will make so much money in the coming years. Users want valuable information and content, not recycled slop.
Why do I have a feeling they’re going to make it optional anyways?
tbf it should be optional, but by default it should be turned off
All these morons put so much money in AI and now they have to shoehorn it everywhere to justify the investment, watching this year’s CES was appalling with them presenting AI junk for “consumers” and when i hear some say “the bubble should burst, but it shouldn’t burst too hard because it could have repercussions throughout the industry and wider” and i’m here like bitch i want it to implode so hard that all these companies that went with AI to go bankrupt and it takes years for everything to recover because for me having a subscription for entertainment is not an option. By owning our hardware is how WE are in control, as soon as you get that hardware through a subscription that’s when they have taken control away from us and that terrifies me and it should you all as well, just remember how it was with Netflix, HBO and all the other subscription services, how they started cheap and then started ramping up the prices year after year and now they will do the same with gaming but now they won’t be able to just take away your games (example The Crew), now they can take away your hardware as well, so for me saying NO to AI is the most obvious choice because there is no benefit for me whatsoever.
I don’t mind an AI summary with references when I search. I do not like ai in almost any other context. Ai has ruined the internet with garbage click bait and fluff articles.
They’re missing the point, I think. We don’t want an opt out, we want them to stop investing in AI altogether. I don’t care that they have a “no ai” engine, I want to support companies who don’t fall to the destructive AI hype.
AI is already opt-out for DDG. Anyone can use DuckDuckGo without AI.
It’s opt-out. The default experience of DDG is with AI. They have a subdomain without AI, and you can disable it on the main domain.
Opt-in would be if it were disabled by default on the main domain, and they had a subdomain for AI.
