DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3044488/90-of-duckduckgo-users-dont-want-ai.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world1823
Comments297https://www.pcworld.com/article/3044488/90-of-duckduckgo-users-dont-want-ai.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
At least they have an AI-free option, as annoying as it is to have to opt into it.
On a related note, it's hilarious to me that the Ecosia search engine has AI built in. Like, I don't think planting any number of trees is going to offset the damage AI has done and will do to the planet.
lol what? Do they have some kind of statement addressing that?
Yes they addressed it here. its kind of understandable given that they want to exist and everyone else has AI... But companies... At least you can turn it off.
At this point, not having AI would be a selling point.
I wish they would have talked about how many trees you need to offset an ecosia AI search
And make AI opt-in rather than opt-out so Ecosia can educate their users
I want to know what economic forces are making it so that having AI, which costs money and very few users actually want, such a forgone conclusion. Who is paying them?
Investors who bought into the hype and the middle managers who are scared of being fired by them
All these MBAs that learned about the advantage of first movers in school and have so little domain knowledge they operate 100% on “we just cant be late to the table”
Climate intelligence. Gods, excuse me while I go fetch my skeleton that was ejected from my body due to the cringe.
someone tell them AI isnt good for the environment
Ecosia produces its own green solar energy. According to them, they produce twice as much as they consume. The AI is still shit, because it is just ChatGPT.
Reducing the albedo of some area just to disperse the captured energy for no utility (ai) is still harmful to the environment and contributes to earth's energy imbalance. Solar energy is great when it replaces fossil fuel emissions, not when it's just wasted.
hot take: this comment gives me a idea for them a opt-in AI powered entirely by solar energy if we solve the ethics problem first ofc.
I don't get this argument when literally everything else is hundreds of times worse like lifestock and cars. Removing either one today would dramatically change the environment.
Do you drive a car or take any kind of transportation?
Well, I don't know about that.
My swiss hoster just started offering AI and says that their AI infrastructure is 100 % powered by renewables and the waste heat is used for district heating.
You could argue that LLM training in itself used so much energy that you'll never be able to compensate for the damage, but I don't know. 🤷
While good, you should always keep in mind that using renewables for this means that power can't be used for other purposes, meaning the difference has to be covered by other sources of energy. Always bear in mind that these things don't exist in a vaccum. The resources they use always mean resources aren't used elsewhere. At worst this would mean that new clean power is built to power a waste, and then old dirty power has to be used for everything else, instead of being replaced by clean energy.
That's actually a very good point, thanks!
Yeah that reminds me of the data centres hogging green energy that was meant for households
On the other hand...the same private entity wouldn't buy the means to produce renewable power if they didn't want to power their AI center. So in the ends, nothing changes, and the power couldn't be used for other purposes because it simply wouldn't be generated.
However, as they did and are using it to promote themselves, they are influencing others to also adopt renewable energy policy in a way, no matter how small.
No, normally I am not that optimistic, but I am trying ^^"
Do you believe them? Why?
It fits their business structure and values and of course there's a good portion good faith on my end because I didn't check first hand.
Corps don't have values.
Corps are run by people and people can run them with values. Our capitalist system encourages acting without values but it is not impossible to do so
Infomaniak?
Yes. :)
I'm just happy they give the option to turn off the ai overview as a setting.
Yeah, luckily it's very easy to turn off.
That’s true for pretty much everything, so not a real argument
Yeah. I'm actually kind of upset that I have to type 'noai'. That should be the standard.
I hope they learn their lesson from their own poll.
I mean, the poll was like as not a publicity stunt, to draw attention to the fact DDG is not doing AI. All the same, the fact they are making "no AI" a selling point is noteworthy.
EDIT: I stand corrected -- apparently DDG does do AI presently. Hopefully they're serious about reconsidering that, then.
They are, unless you opt out.
exactly.
Thanks for the correction! I updated my comment to mention it.
I still get a bunch of AI bullshit unless I go out of my way. Also I swear they keep reactivating it as much as google when you opt out (or select ddg no ai as your search engine in Firefox and still see that garbage).
Thanks for the correction, I was indeed wrong about that. I updated my comment accordingly.
test
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.
You can turn all the AI features off on regular DDG search settings. Best I can tell that achuevescthe same as using the no AI filter.
Except it’s not very good. I turn it off and still get AI pictures and videos, and it gets rid of some pictures I know aren’t AI.
I’m looking forward to adding it to my browser settings as default search!
Already doable in Firefox, just right click in the search box then add search engine ;)
Just edit the ddg entry instead of adding a new one. It’s super easy to change the url for the search in settings.
I don't know how you do that. I can't edit the standard DDG on desktop at all. Didn't see anything at first glance in about:config either.
Easier to me to just add a new engine.
PR stunt exposed
I'm pretty sure it asks you how often you want to see the AI overview doesn't it? Can't you just click never?
I like kagi's approach of generating an AI overview if you end your query with a question mark. Is this a search or a question?
I'm not a fan of Kagi's approach to anything, frankly. The fact that they're charging money for a search engine, and using an LLM? Hard pass.
How dare they charge money instead of selling data or ads!?
I don't have a problem with them selling ads. I have a problem with the insidious tracking that has become a part of those ads. Mojeek sells ads but doesn't track you everywhere. Also, there's SearX instances, which typically don't sell ads or data.
They also don't use LLMs. If you think Kagi isn't giving away or selling your data, think again, because the LLM is doing it as a core function.
The article already notes that
But the opposite is also true. Maybe it’s not 90% to 10% elsewhere, but I’d expect the same general imbalance because some people who would answer yes to ai in a survey on a search web site don’t go to search web sites in the first place. They go to ChatGPT or whatever.
It still creeps me out that people use LLMs as search engines nowadays.
That was the plan. That's (I'm guessing) why the search results have slowly yet noticeably degraded since Ai has been consumer level.
They WANT you to use Ai so they can cater the answers. (tin foil hat)
I really do believe that though. Call me a conspiracy theorist but damn it, it fits.
It's not that wild of a conspiracy theory. Hard to get definite proof though because you would have to compare actual search results from the past with the results of the same search from today, and we unfortunately can't travel back in time.
But there are indicators for your theory to be true:
Now, all of the points listed above can be proven. If you put all of that together it seems at least highly likely that your "conspiracy theory" is in fact true.
I'd argue that SEO was one of the biggests causes of search result degradation and consider any complaints coming from them as highly suspect due to conflicting interests. Eg, a change that makes it harder to game the search engine algorithms is good for searchers but bad for SEOs.
I hope the whole industry dies (or already is? I don't hear much about it these days lol). They are just marketers whose whole job is to get you to look at their shit instead of the most relevant results.
Yeah, I think SEO is pretty much dead by now, and probably because web search as we knew it is kind of dead as well. You'll probably need to spend ad money if you want visibility. But I'm no expert on SEO and I could be wrong.
Yeah, search has degraded along with the Internet, you almost need an LLM now to filter out all the garbage hits. For a while, adding "reddit" to your search term was an OK high level filter to remove blogspam and e-commerce sites, but interacting with reddit is so annoying now that it's barely an option and many of the quality reddit posters have moved on while the state and corporate astroturfers are running the show. Never mind that the "reddit filter" also removed results from much better sources, like specialist forums.
They WANT you to use Ai so they can
cater the answerssell you ads and stop you from using the internet.You mean Google.
And Bing, and searches that use google and Bing results (DDG, ecosia)
All of them. I use DDG as a primary and even those results are worse.
In Google Search's prime DDG was still terrible and not a viable competitor even with the privacy advantage. Now both services are almost comparable, so it's kind of a no-brainer to ditch Google.
Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.
SEO has been fucking up searches long before LLMs were a thing.
Thankfully Google is not the only search provider.
Most people don't even know the difference between an URL bar and a search bar, or more precisely: most devices use a browser that deliberately obfuscates that difference.
when browsers overload the url field to act as a search field, can you blame people for not knowing the difference? To the users its become a distinction without a difference.
They say that whats tolerated is whats encouraged. Browser software companies have encouraged people to be uninformed about the tool they are using. Easier to mess with them that way.
But they all suck, or rather the Internet kinda sucks these days. Google very much included in the sucking.
I know some of them personally and they usually claim to have decent to very good media literacy too. I would even say some of them are possibly more intelligent than me. Well, usually they are but when it comes to tech, they miss the forest for the trees I think.
For some issues, especially related to programming and Linux, I feel like I kinda have to at this point. Google seems to have become useless, and DDG was never great to begin with but is arguably better than Google now. I've had some very obscure issues that I spent quite some time searching for, only to drop it into ChatGPT and get a link to some random forum post that discusses it. The biggest one was a Linux kernel regression that was posted on the same day in the Arch Linux forums somewhere. Despite having a hunch about what it could be and searching/struggling for over an hour, I couldn't find anything. ChatGPT then managed to link me the post (and a suggested fix: switching to LTS kernel) in less than minute.
For general purpose search tho, hell no. If I want to know factual data that's easy to find I'll rely on the good old search engine. And even if I have to use an LLM, I don't really trust it unless it gives me links to the information or I can verify that what it says is true.
I'm seeing almost daily the fuck-ups resulting from somebody trying to fix something with ChatGPT, then coming to the forums because it didn't work.
I agree that happens, but it has nothing to do with what op said. They didn't want a solution, they wanted a link to where the problem was being discussed so they could work out a solution.
People seem to really confure the difference between asking an llm how to patch a boat vs where did people discuss ways to patch a boat.
Most likely because if they came directly with their problem to whatever platform you are on, they would have been scolded at for not trying hard enough to solve it on their own. Or close the post because it has already been asked.
Yup this is a great example. LLM for non opinion based stuff or for stuff that’s not essential for life. It’s great for finding a recipe but if you’re gonna rely on the internet or an LLM to help you form an opinion on something that requires objective thinking then no. If I said hey internet/LLM is humour good or bad, it would insert a swayed view.
It simply can’t be trusted. I can’t even trust it return shopping links so I have retreated back to real life. If it can’t play fair I no longer use it as a tool.
I use kagi assistant. It does a search, summarizes, then gives references to the origin of each claim. Genuinely useful.
How often do you check the summaries? Real question, I've used similar tools and the accuracy to what it's citing has been hilariously bad. Be cool if there was a tool out there that was bucking the trend.
Yeah, we were checking if school in our district was canceled due to icy conditions. Googles model claimed that a county wide school cancellation was in effect and cited a source. I opened, was led to our official county page and the very first sentence was a firm no.
It managed to summarize a simple and short text into its exact opposite
I also sometimes use the Kagi summaries and it's definitely been wrong before. One time I asked what the term was for something in badminton and it came up with a different badminton term. When I looked at the cited source, it was a multiple choice quiz with the wrong term being the first answer.
It's reliable that I still use it, although more often to quickly identify which search results are worth reading.
Depends on how important it is. Looking for a hint for a puzzle game: never. Trying to find out actually important info: always.
They make it easy though because after every statement it has these numbered annotations and you can just mouse over to read the text.
You can chose different models and they differ in quality. The default one can be a bit hit and miss.
I can't speak for the original poster, but I also use Kagi and I sometimes use the AI assistant, mostly just for quick simple questions to save time when I know most articles on it are gonna have a lot of filler, but it's been reliable for other more complex questions too. (I just would rather not rely on it too heavily since I know the cognitive debt effects of LLMs are quite real.)
It's almost always quite accurate. Kagi's search indexing is miles ahead of any other search I've tried in the past (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant, SearXNG) so the AI naturally pulls better sources than the others as a result of the underlying index. There's a reason I pay Kagi 10 bucks a month for search results I could otherwise get on DuckDuckGo. It's just that good.
I will say though, on more complex questions with regard to like, very specific topics, such as a particular random programming library, specific statistics you'd only find from a government PDF somewhere with an obscure name, etc, it does tend to get it wrong. In my experience, it actually doesn't hallucinate, as in if you check the sources there will be the information there... just not actually answering that question. (e.g. if you ask it about a stat and it pulls up reddit, but the stat is actually very obscure, it might accidentally pull a number from a comment about something entirely different than the stat you were looking for)
In my experience, DuckDuckGo's assistant was extremely likely to do this, even on more well-known topics, at a much higher frequency. Same with Google's Gemini summaries.
To be fair though, I think if you really, really use LLMs sparingly and with intention and an understanding of how relatively well known the topic is you're searching for, you can avoid most hallucinations.
@AmbitiousProcess @Warl0k3
I use Kagi as my primary search engine for almost 2 years now and it's really good! I started to use the Kagi assistant recently to explain complex concepts to me and I like it. I love how it links me to sources. When I'm using a LLM tool, like Kagi's assistant, I want to learn about the topic, I don't use it for quick answers.
A lot of people are just against 'AI'/LLM's, and I hate it too when it's being shoved into my face. But consensual LLM's are just another tool that I utilize to learn about something.
I use Perplexity for my searches, and it really depends on how much I care about the subject. I heard a name and don't know who they are? LLM summary is good enough to have an idea. Doing research or looking up technical info? I open the cited sources.
For others here, I use kagi and turned the LLM summaries off recently because they weren't close to reliable enough for me personally so give it a test. I use LLMs for some tasks but I'm yet to find one that's very reliable for specifics
You can set up any AI assistant that way with custom instructions. I always do, and I require it to clearly separate facts with sources from hearsay or opinion.
lol, the random text generator does not understand what any of those things are.
what makes it creepy?
it just makes it evermore obvious to them how many people in their life are sheep that believe anything the read online, i assume? a false sense of confidence where one mught have just said 'i dont know"
What an absolutely arrogant attitude 🤣 You actually believe there is some gap here 🤣 just amazing.
Not using AI doesn't mean your performing whatever task your doing better. It has nothing to do with being able to parse results for bullshit or not.
I think the attitude of being virtuosos or preachy can seep in at times, especially when being part of a cause but IMO diplomacy, having conversations and opening their mind to objectivity has to be better than telling people they are wrong.
I know this is easy to say, and esp when so many people are just so addicted to social media and the internet.
I have had conversations with friends, family where they can have a clear conversation about how much propaganda is pushed on to them, and they then turn straight to their phone and hoover up and hour of FB. It does make you think wow sheep. But I have to remind myself we don’t get change by telling people ‘you clearly don’t know your own mind’
So many people were already using tiktok or youtube as google search. I think AI is arguably better than those
edit: New business, take your chatgpt question and turn it into a tiktok video. The Slop must go on
The main problem is that LLMs are pulling from those sources too. An LLM often won't distinguish between highly reputable sources and any random page that has enough relevant keywords, as it's not actually capable of picking its own sources carefully and analyzing each one's legitimacy, at least not without a ton of time and computing power that would make it unusable for most quick queries.
Genuinely, do you think the average person tiktok'ing their question is getting highly reputable sources? The average American has what, a 7th grade reading level? I think the LLM might have a better idea at this point
First, its results are often simply wrong, so that's no good. Second, the more people use the AI summaries, the easier it'll be for the AI companies to subtly influence the results in their advantage. Think of advertising or propaganda.
This is already happening btw, and the reason Musk created Grokipedia. Grok (and even other llm's!) already use it as a "trusted source", which it is anything but.
Okay but its a search engine, they can literally just pick websites that align with a certain viewpoint and hide ones that don't, Its not really a new problem. If they just make grokpedia the first result then its not like not having the AI give you a summary changed anything.
So literally the same shit as before with search but wrapped up in a nice paragraph with citations you can follow up on?
Do you also use Arch btw?
Nice
Yeah, this is why polling is hard.
Online polls are much more likely to be answered by people who like to answer polls than people who don't. People who use Duck Duck Go are much more likely to be privacy-focused, knowledgeable enough to use a different search engine other than the default, etc.
This is also an echo chamber (The Fediverse) discussing the results of a poll on another similar echo chamber (Duck Duck Go). You won't find nearly as many people on Lemmy or Mastodon who love AI as you will in most of the world. Still, I do get the impression that it's a lot less popular than the AI companies want us to think.
So you make noai the default, yes?
I think it's more like NOOOO.
I checked mine and it was off, I didn’t need to do anything.
Maybe if you close it one time it doesn’t reopen?
Meanwhile, at HQ: "The userbase hallucinated that they don't want AI. Maybe we prompted them wrong?"
The prompt was bad: there was no option to vote for "a little bit of AI as a tool is not bad but don't force feed it to me".
I think there were many people who voted for "no AI" who would've voted for "a little bit of ai" if they had the option.
There were probably also people who voted for "yes AI" who would have voted for "a little bit of ai when I explicitly ask for it" if they had the option.
And yet it's opt out, not opt in.
Because the poll just ended... it's been opt out since before the poll and nothing has changed, yet (if anything does change). How is this not obvious?
They should have asked before including AI in the first place.
Asking an existing userbase for any kind of change will pretty much always result in a no.
If the project requires minimal resources and doesn't have a major downside, then implementing your own version before asking is fine.
They didn't serve a bunch of ex alcoholics a full bottle of whisky, all they did is make you scroll twice on your mouse wheel.
If you're trying to position yourself as a search engine that hasn't enshittified, don't head down that road without asking. Know your userbase. They're using duckduckgo for a reason.
I made https://lite.duckduckgo.com/ my homepage. No AI and super fast loading. AI would be fine if it was opt-in. Shoving it into everything to see what works just makes people hate it. Looking at you MS.
whoa nice! Thanks!
For people trying to configure that in mozilla (I am trying to get away from it but for now :/)
https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=%25s(this has to be=%s, lemmy keeps mutilating that to=%25severytime I save my post)Done.
It's horrible for the environment too and wastes electricity. It's fucked up that Google makes everything you search an AI search.
Well, Google is an evil megacorp, so not really surprising.
Damn didn't know about this lite version, thanks, also gonna change it into it.
There's also https://html.duckduckgo.com/. It's like the main page, but without javascript.
THE AI by default marketing is failing? Shocker
I think LLMs are fine for specific uses. A useful technology for brainstorming, debugging code, generic code examples, etc. People are just weary of oligarchs mandating how we use technology. We want to be customers but they want to instead shape how we work, as if we are livestock
Right? Like let me choose if and when I want to use it. Don't shove it down our throats and then complain when we get upset or don't use it how you want us to use it. We'll use it however we want to use it, not you.
I should further add - don't fucking use it in places it's not capable of properly functioning and then trying to deflect the blame on the AI from yourself, like what Air Canada did.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know
That is a tiny fraction of a rounding error for a company that size. And it doesn't come anywhere near being just compensation for the stress and loss of time it likely caused.
There should be some kind of general punitive "you tried to screw over a customer or the general public" fee defined as a fraction of the companies' revenue. Could be waived for small companies if the resulting sum is too small to be worth the administrative overhead.
It's a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.
It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot's fault. With this ruling, it's the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they're misled by the chatbot. That's excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.
Definitely agree, there should have been some punitive damages for making them go through that while they were mourning.
They were trying to argue that it was legally responsible for its own actions? Like, that it's a person? And not even an employee at that? FFS
You just know they're going to make a separate corporation, put the AI in it, and then contract it to themselves and try again.
...what kind of brain damage did the rep have to think that was a viable defense? surely their human customer service personnel are also responsible for their own actions?
It makes sense to do it, it's just along the lines of evil company.
If they lose, it's some bad press and people will forget.
If they win, they've begun setting precedent to fuck over their customers and earn more money. Even if it only had a 5% chance of success, it was probably worth it.
sure but there was no way that wouldn't have been thrown out.
But the shareholders..... /s
I am explicitly against the use case probably being thought of by many of the respondents - the “ai summary” that pops in above the links of a search result. It is a waste if I didn't ask for it, it is stealing the information from those pages, damaging the whole WWW, and ultimately, gets the answer horribly wrong enough times to be dangerous.
Google became crap ever since they added AI. Microsoft became crap ever since they added AI. OpenAI started losing money the moment they started working on AI. Coincidence? I think not!
Rational people don't want Abominable Intelligence anywhere near them.
Personally, I don't mind the AI overviews, but they shouldn't show up every time you do a search. That's just a waste of energy.
Google became crap about 10 years ago when they added the product banner in the top, and had the first 5-10 search results be promoted ads. Long before they ever considered adding AI.
I guess. And then they removed the "Don't be evil" motto just to drive the point home.
But you have to agree, the company DID become even worse once they started using AI.
Oh absolutely. It's just important to remember that they've been horrible for a long time, and has shown more ads in a single search than your average 30 minute youtube video.
Time is sneaking up on us. It's not even 10 years anymore. It's closer to 20. 💀
Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don't have competitors, you don't have to work as hard to provide search results -- especially if you're actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they're interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn't responsible for the decline of search quality.
Yeah google kinda started sucking a few years before AI went mainstream, the search results took a dive in quality and garbage had already started circulating to the top.
Google and Microsoft were crap before AI, I don't remember when google removed the "don't be evil" but at that point they have been crap for a few years already.
Indeed Young_Gilgamesh
I have a uBlock filter for those
I mind them. Nobody at my workplace scrolls beyond the AI overview and every single one of the overviews they quote to me about technical issues are wrong, 100%. Not even an occasional "lucky guess".
Good for you. I Meant as a design choice for a search engine. Why waste electricity?
You can choose how often you want the AI Overwiew to appear! It like asks you the first time you get one in a small pop up. I still think they should instead work on "highlighting relevant text from a website" like how google used to do. It was so much better.
I did not know that. Never noticed a pop up. And does this work with both search engines? You can turn off the AI features on DuckDuckGo with like two clicks, but I can't seem to find the option on Google.
I was talking about DDG because I thought you were talking about DDG in the last part. I dont think you can turn off AI completely on Google.
And how much of their budget are they blowing on AI features despite polls showing their regular users don't even want it? Probably also 90%.
AI? FuckFuckNo
As much as I agree with this poll, duck duck go is a very self selecting audience. The number doesn’t actually mean much statistically.
If the general public knew that “AI” is much closer to predictive text than intelligence they might be more wary of it
There was no implication that this was a general poll designed to demonstrate the general public’s attitudes. I’m not sure why you mentioned this.
I mean you Gotta Hand it to "Ai" - it is very sophisticated, and Ressource intensive predicitive Text.
The poll didn't even ask a real question. "Yes AI or no AI?" No context.
NOW the question is, will they listen? Cause we've seen so many times where a company says they're taking feedback and then do the thing that their audience didn't want them to do in the first place anyways. Now, of course, they could have more data and metrics that says people don't care or do want the BS, but I doubt all the companies that DID go hard into AI actually looked at legit numbers, since all the big heads are now saying "why aren't you people using this stuff?"
Couple months ago, I learned that duckduckgo has settings about disabling AI content. Settings>AI features.
Easy as that.
Not as easy if you auto-delete your cookies on the closing of your browser.
I had that problem, so then I started using https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ - it works well.
On duckduckgo.com it's unfortunately enabled by default though. You have to go out of your way to set your search browser to noai.duckduckgo.com if you want default AI disabled (which you'll want on e.g. private browsing windows/any browser that autodeletes cookies when you close it). It's extra hassle because most privacy web browsers use DDG by default, not the noai subdomain.
Companies that can not be trusted to not add features their customers do not want can not be trusted to keep them disabled by default.
If the door to AI exists, we, the users, do not trust the organization to keep it locked.
It's so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.
If they take the poll to heart it can still be a sucess. They can advertise that they listened to their users and changed course.
That's the thing about really good marketing - it should not only drive users to use your service, but the reactions to that marketing can be used as market research to improve your product and future marketing in a manner that drives even more users to your product.
I am fairly sure this is the actual point of the campaign. The selection bias for a ‘poll’ like this (one that instantly on-boards you to the ai-disabled version of your product if you click answer negative, no less) is so great that I don’t believe the suits/analysts at ddg ever envisioned a different result. Polls and comment sections lure the extreme viewpoints and the ddg crowd already skews privacy-conscious so this was a highly expected outcome.
What the campaign does instead is:
It’s quite clever imo, and there’s no real bad outcome for what I assume is a pretty inexpensive campaign.
I would like to petition to rename AI to
Simulated
Human
Intelligence
Technology
or: computer rendered anonymized plagiarism
I would like to petition to rename AI to
Fucking stupid and useless
FSAU? That's not a word.
Tell me you don’t know shit about LLMs without telling me so:
It's funny but it still lies about intelligence
'Intelligence' is a measure, not an absolute. Human intelligence can range anywhere from genius to troglodyte. But you're right, still not human, still at very best simulated, and isn't capable of reason, just the illusion of reason.
On public transit, it bottoms out.
omfg you don't say
Okay, so that’s not what the article says. It says that 90% of respondents don’t want AI search.
Moreover, the article goes into detail about how DuckDuckGo is still going to implement AI anyway.
Seriously, titles in subs like this need better moderation.
The title was clearly engineered to generate clicks and drive engagement. That is not how journalism should function.
Unless I'm mistaken this title is generated to match the title at the link. Are you saying the mods should update titles to accurately reflect the content of the articles posted?
Also, Duck Duck Go is a search engine. What other ai would it do?
It has a separate llm chat interface, and you can disable the ai summary that comes up on web search results.
That is the title from the news article. It might not be how good journalism would work, but copying the title of the source is pretty standard in most news aggregator communities.
Well, that's how journalism has always functioned. People call it "clickbait" as if it's something new, but headlines have always been designed to grab your attention and get you to read.
That's when the Silicon Valley types all bring out the ol' "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." Well, they already showed what LLM can do and it's not that great.
I guess they haven’t asked me or it’d be 91%
This guy knows the SHIT out of statistics!
You've been learning statistics from an LLM, haven't you?
I’m a proud graduate from the Terrence Howard school of math.
Had to look him up. Gold.
It's funny how many people ruffle their feathers over this. Same type of comments as when somebody first shared this poll here: you can't expect this to be representative, it's not a yes/no question etc.
Let's put it like this: I do not want AI pushed on me in almost every online situation. That is a yes/no question to me.
Why? Because it's not ready, wastes the planet, and is the USA's big gamble.
Is there a way to get Firefox/Librewolf to have noai.duckduckgo.com set as the default search engine in settings? I can't find a way to set a custom link for something like that.
In your settings, first deselect Google as default so you can delete it.
Then go follow this guide
wow, Firefox can do this natively now? I've been using an addon for so many years
Thank you. It's nice to browse search results with one less annoyance again.
I would have no problem with AI if it could be useful.
The problem is no matter how many times I'm promised otherwise it cannot automate my job and talk to the idiots for me. It just hallucinates a random gibberish which is obviously unhealthful.
I've found it useful for a few things. I had had a song intermittently stuck in my head for a few years and had unsuccessfully googled it a few times. Couldn't remember artist, name, lyrics (it was in a language I don't speak) - and chatGPT got it in a couple of tries. Things that I'm too vague about to be able to construct a search prompt and want to explore. Stuff like that. I just don't trust it with anything that I want actual facts for.
Yep, preparing a proper search is my use case. Like "how is this special screw called?". I can describe the screw and tell the model to provide me a list of how that screw could be called.
Then I can search for the terms of that list and one of the terms is the correct one. It's way better than hoping that somebody described the screw in the same words in some obscure forum.
But, is it worth to burn the planet, make RAM, GPUs, hard drives unaffordable for everybody and probably crash the world economy for a better screw search? I doubt it.
The thing is Google was already pretty good at that before things like chat GPT came out.
I remember many years ago I searched for "that movie where they steal a painting by changing the temperature" and Google got it on the first hit. That was way before AI.
It’s really good at answering customer questions for me, to be honest.
But, I still have to okay it. Just in case. There’s no trust.
However that still does take a lot less bandwidth for me because I’m not good at the customer facing aspects of my business.
I still would, as the increased productivity, once again, does not lead to reduced hours. Always more productive, always locked into a bullshit schedule.
Prompt or model issue my dude
Or you’re one of the few who have a pretty niche job
Just things like different words or vocabulary, or helping with some code related knowledge, Linux issues… or even random known knowledge that you happen not to know
I think LLMs are also just genuinely not as universally useful as expected. Everyone thinks it can automate every job except their own not because everyone thinks their job is special but because they know all the intricate parts of that job that LLMs are still really bad at.
For instance AI could totally do my job at a surface level but it quickly devolves into deal breaking caveats which I am lumping into very broad categories to save time:
Case in point for me. AI cannot write documentation for new technical procedures because by definition they are new procedures. The information is not in its knowledge base, because I haven't written it yet.
I'm sorry but why the absolute flaming fuck does everyone assume that programming is the only job in the universe?
There are entire industries that don't revolve around Linux. It's amazing but not everyone in the world has to care about programming. Everyone needs to stop telling me that AI is good at programming. Firstly because it isn't, it's good damn awful. Secondly because I'm not a programmer, so I don't care.
I’m just giving examples I relate to, and describe my use of it
That explains why you think it’s awful at it then. You just believe the haters because you have confirmation bias. Fact is companies and people wouldn’t use it to code if it wasn’t good at that
It’s perfect for summaries, known general knowledge, correcting text, roleplay, repetitive tasks and some logic problems…
Well if by that you mean I've used it and it's crap, then yeah, I've confirmed it.
I have yet to use chatgpt.
Don't do heroin, kids.
You saying anyone that has an opinion on murder has to also have murdered?
To have an opinion on how it feels to murder: yes
To understand the repercussions on society: no, because you are part of that society
I'm talking about using a piece of software, no idea how you arrived to murder from that. People on this platform also have many opinions on TikTok without ever trying it. Feels like they are talking out of their ass whenever they mention it.
It is an example of something you do not need to experience first hand to have a valid opinion on. Outsider perspectives are valuable too.
I care about privacy and with chatgpt I understand that (at least at one point) you need to create an account, which means each time you use it it is building a database on you. I've also seen in interviews with Altman that even he acknowledges the privacy risks of chatgpt.
What's ignorant about my opinion there?
...a piece of software that has encouraged suicide, and is proven to create psychosis?
Yeah, it's just software. My dudes.
Said poll.
The other 10% are bots
Customer service was sparse before, now it is nonexistent.
AI is not impressive or worth all the trade offs and worse quality of life. It is decent in some areas but mostly grifter tech.
It IS an impressive tech
An impressive grift
It really isn't. Gen AI is trash. AI art and music are slop. The only place is is decent is with data and some coding basics and vibe coding leads to security issues.
And roleplay, and correcting text, and finding ideas, and explaining school stuff, and finding potential bugs…
Strongly disagree with you
While no doubt it may be that most users of DuckDuckGo are anti-AI given the nature of the service and who it attracts, the 90% metric makes me believe that the people who ambivalently use DuckDuckGo's AI (and are not pro or anti) did not vote in this at all and may find themselves using DuckDuckGo less if they see the surface-level convenience randomly disappear from the service.
So I assume they'll get rid of the AI and they'll see a drop in users overtime as a percentage of minimum effort types get confused or annoyed. And then they'll bring it back as they see a drop in users, annoy the users that hate AI and they'll leave as well. And neither group will end up ever returning.
This whole poll was a terrible idea.
I switch away from DDG to brave because it had better search results and its AI summary was here first (iirc) and worked well
Don't build AI into everything and assume you know how your users want to use it. If they do want to use AI, give me an MCP server to interact with your service instead and let users build out their own tooling.
Most objective article (sarcasm)
Hi :)
I’ve been much more inactive than before as well
Sure, use what you want :)
And at least they’re not owned by a transphobic moron, but that’s how things are
I don’t use it much either, but mainly cuz there’s no one to speak to
What's wrong about this?
Nothing if disclosed and you’re okay with it. Else, opinions and partiality get in the way of truth and facts
As a DuckDuckGo user who uses claude and ChatGPT every day, I don’t want AI features in duck duck go because I probably would never use them. So many companies are adding chatbot features and most of them can’t compete with the big names. Why would I use a bunch of worse LLMs and learn a bunch of new interfaces when I can just use the ones I’m already comfortable with
On DuckDuckGo that is unsurprising
There’s noai.duckduckgo.com and lite.duckduckgo.com to help you use DDG without this ai stuff and without having to fiddle with settings. Especially helpful if you frequently open private tabs and then the settings get cleared on normal DDG.
Even without AI, you can’t find Neocities sites there because DuckDuckGo relies on Bing.
Even that I would consider wildly unjust. User data would HAVE to be opt IN.
A massive underestimation
Nah, the privacy people are way more against AI that most people, I assure you
I think most people find something like chatgpt and copilot useful in their day to day lives. LLMs are a very helpful and powerful technology. However, most people are against these models collecting every piece of data imaginable from you. People are against the tech, they're against the people running the tech.
I don't think most people would mind if a FOSS LLM, that's designed with privacy and complete user control over their data, was integrated with an option to completely opt out. I think that's the only way to get people to trust this tech again and be onboard.
that was why i started using ddg
and 45% of those respondents were A.I.
It's the one where I clicked "No AI" and the results page thanked me for voting yes!
Yes! It's completely silly. A 'poll' designed exactly for the people that want a noai option, to be shared in places like this so those people (like me) can get the tiny satisfaction of hitting No.
They were never wondering what the result would be, they were never trying to gauge their userbase's preferences. It's just a page they thought people would share to spread awareness of DDG.
90%? Could be selection bias. I think, the result would be a different one if users would have been asked to in the Google AI tab.
You need to fetch users from different places for your sample to get more meaningful results.
Wasn't this a poll to determine how DDG will use AI in the future? I don't believe it was meant to be representative of the general population.
In this regard it makes perfect sense. I guess it was just me who asked for the general population answer.
The pessimistic in me says it's only a marketing campaign and they won't change anything.They made the poll be shared by people on both camps and got "We're great because we let you choose" as a response after answering.
I see the shit that people send out, obvious LLM crap, and wonder how poor they must write to consider the LLM output worth something. And then wonder if the people consuming this LLM crap are OK with baseline mediocrity at best. And that's not even getting into the ethical issues of using it.
I wonder what percentage of Lemmy users are absolutely sick of seeing variations of the exact same thing, over, and over, and over, and fucking over again.
Shocking.
I have found a couple times an LLM being good for searches. My example is scooters in the US, because of commute I'd like to find an electric scooter, the kind like a Vespa. But you do a search, you find all sorts about the standing scooters, look for electric motorcycles and they start getting to car level prices or aren't street legal, it gets to be a mess. Chat GPT turned that search into a relatively quick one that I could find a local place that I'm going to check out when there's not ice on the ground. But the important part was making it require links. As a tool, it can have its uses.
So all of that said... Google and other searches doing AI did fuck all and nothing to help on this, and I agree 100% I do not want AI on the search for DDG
To be honest, I think most don't know about noai.duckduckgo.com – at least I didn't.
Also, lots have apps have the main duckduckgo as a search option. I've not seen any have the noai as an option.
We are on lemmy now, so I don't get your point here.
Lemmy is far superior to Reddit.
I'll take comments that make no sense for 1,000 Alex.
Most people use whatever is the default, even if that default doesn't perfectly is to their needs/wants.
That applies even to people that changed their search engine form Google to Duckduckgo.
Every decisions takes some energy to think about, and the human brain wants to avoid spending energy as much as possible.
That is why LLMs should be opt-in/by-request instead of opt-out. If people want to occasionally use them, they can decide themselves if spending that additional electricity is worth it.
Search engines and LLMs are different things, one is for finding content written by humans, the other is for getting a plausible answer to a inquiry.
I'm not going to use some weird alternative url to remove ai crap, just like I'm not going to append -ai or whatever it was to every google search. I'm just not going to use these services at all. Want me as a user? Remove the AI garbage. It's that simple.
Great, we're here. I had to double check i was on the fediverse because of your comment.
I've been using it. Put it as the default search engine on all my devices, even my work hardware. Before that, I just had the AI features toggled off, but those settings don't stick when clearing all cookies (which I have to do way too often).
I have also left reddit 2 years ago and never visited again. So no idea what your point is?
It does make a little sense though. Most people won’t really use the feature they just want know they have access.
When choosing a search engine, a “standard” user will just think “this one has AI answers so it must be ‘better’” even if they don’t use AI answers. At this point it’s a marketing trick.
Whoever answered this poll, is already probably not a fan of “AI”
Most people wanting AI probably don’t use DDG though. Else they would use Brave Search I guess
I haven’t seen the poll though
I like the ai assistant answers, seems to not include much SEO bs. Ddg, bing, google, startpage, whatever... All shit SEO results imho
The AI assistant answers are just synthesized from the shitty SEO results.
True but rather have that then sorting through that myself.
Blatantly misleading title. Makes it sounds like it encompassed more than just search engines.
Every poll is instantly skewed with the user base. I think Ai is amazing, but it's not worth the hype. Im cautious about its actual uses and its spectacular failures. Im not a Fuck AI person. But im also not an Ai is going to be our God in 2 years person. And I feel like im more the average.
I find Google Gemini to be useless and annoying. I do enjoy grok but I don't think life would end if we walked away from Ai tomorrow.
Most people against Ai probably have their nose in SearXNG and 4get.
Now can we have a poll from Dr. Thunder about what we went our Cola to taste like?
Sure, but I wonder how many of them actually understand what AI is and means.
Most commenters on both Reddit and Lemmy don't understand what a LLM is or how/if it differentiates from AI itself.
i doubt that was the intention given their products https://duck.ai/
How many people want Bing results as well?Coll stick to Searx
Bing gets shat on too much. I used it for a while a couple years ago and other than the usual microslop shadyness it was a completely fine search engine and the search results were fine.
Guess I'm in the 10%
You want to destroy our planet and pay way more in electricity for a random sentence generator to spit out slop?
You've managed to be wrong 4 times in one sentence, that's impressive
Bro you guys are freaking out too much about AI. I mean a lot of companies are pushy about it but DuckDuckGo is not. There are actually quite a lot of use cases for me personally where AI can be really useful. DuckDuckGo is not Google or Microsoft. Chill out guys
No one is freaking out. It's use case might be valuable to some, that's undeniable.
The problem is that it's current implementation is abhorrent, unjustifiable for what it achieves and forced onto users that don't even want it in the first place.
I know myself that a huge portion of users don't want anything to do with AI. That they disagree with it for a number of very valid reasons. It's not unreasonable to assume that different browser companies know this as well.
So why the fuck does not a single one of these shitlord browser companies AT LEAST release a version of their browser without any AI bundled in (regardless of it being on or off by default, like, be for real), let alone oppose it. We're essentially begging at this point for someone to just...do nothing.
Doesn't sound too difficult to me. But what do I know, I'm just a user of a browser.
Also, I said a 'huge portion' because I was generalising.
90%
90% of users want nothing to do with it.
And yet, here it is, whether they like it or not
Orienting the entire global economy for the niche use cases for AI of a very small number of people is a worthwhile freakout. We haven't reached 'freakout' yet, but we should.
This is def the main takeaway. We've been watching this AI craze unfold for years at this point with very little to show for it other than political weaponization, skyrocketing prices, and every piece of software we use being completely enshittified.
anyone under 74 use DuckDuckGo?
Yes
ಠ_ಠ
Get off my
lawnsearch engine!