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)
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.
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
Nobody actually posted the link to the poll?
It is the article, to be fair.
Yes, at the very bottom though.
Well, for now, it seems we pretty much all feel the same way
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
Now we’ll see where in the enshittification pipeline they are by whether or not they listen to their users.
Still holding steady ay 93% NO.
Yup 80k votes later still 93%
If the percentage significantly changes after 80k, then it’s probably AIs.
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.
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
Yeah, in a sane world with a good company what 93% of users want will be the default.
Yes, you can define your own search engine on firefox though. Just type in the no ai link of ddg and the search parameter.
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.
Got a big ass laugh out of this
deleted by creator
It’s at 93% against AI right now, I hope they take it into consideration and make it opt in
ai is an extreme that an overwhelming majority of people reject and probably the clearest sign of how much control of oligarchy has over us since their will over it is forcing the rest of us to accept it like we do with accepting the lack of universal basic income; socialized healthcare; minimum wage increase; education invistements; etc. despite an overwhelming majority of people needing it.
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. 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.
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.
Thought this comment from reddit summed it up well
AI is more than a tool, it is a suite of projects that the richest companies in the world have poured trillions of dollars in to and are now flailing to recoup their investment. It has devastating effects on communities around the data centers that make up its infrastructure. When these companies continue to charge forward unregulated, it will have increasingly devastating consequences. A hammer doesn’t consume all the fresh water in an aquifer and make it undrinkable, nor does a screwdriver drive up the costs of energy to unaffordable levels, a spanner does not purchase politicians and corrupt any effort to reign in the harmful effects of a blind advance for the sake of profit generation.
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.
Skill issue
Lack of skill issue
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.
I hope I never have to use “your” code.
It goes through two levels of review, we do not accept slop.
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?
Definitely more helpful. But I would preface that with proper context building.
It isn’t enough (generally) to just tell it to do the thing. It is far better to to tell it to do a thing, and how, and provide rules, and provide examples, and provide the company’s best practices.
And I realize it takes a bit to get there, but I’m at a point that with enough context provisions, I can generate 10+ files of code for a net new feature that is 99%+ how I would do it in sub 5 minutes.
Do I tell Product that I still need another week? Absolutely.
Context is king.
While I agree it has uses and can be a good tool, it was trained on stolen material/data. These are unprecedented levels of theft, and its going unpunished.
I do not know what alternatives were available for the learning phase. Simply stating the cost it came at. And that’s not even taking into consideration what its doing to the job market, youth, disinformation, etc.
I prefer a world without it.
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.
It’s real fucking simple: let people turn it on if they want to use it (any feature, not just ai), and let everyone else leave it disabled by default. The fact that they have to poll users for what they want shows how tone deaf they are to begin with.
Edit:
Also:
The company argues that users should decide how AI shows up in their digital lives, rather than having it embedded automatically across products.
This is a lie. How many times I get that stupid AI summary on search results.
Yeah they’re doing it backwards. AI is on by default unless you specifically go to noai.duckduckgo.com
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.
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
Because it’s exactly what they wrote?
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.
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.
That’s opt-out not opt-in. You have to go to a special address if you don’t want AI.
I’m pretty sure everyone understood what I meant, anyway.
Nah, those two cannot be used synonymously. They mean different things, and one is predatory and problematic, the other is not.
