Yeah. I'm actually kind of upset that I have to type 'noai'. That should be the standard.
DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI
Submitted 2 months ago by very_well_lost@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3044488/90-of-duckduckgo-users-dont-want-ai.html
Comments
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 2 months ago
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 months ago
I hope they learn their lesson from their own poll.
Balinares@pawb.social 2 months ago
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.
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
It’ll be a cold day in hell when AI-horny suits learn the lesson that people don’t want AI
Egonallanon@feddit.uk 2 months ago
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.
Seleni@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
pirat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
achuevescthe
felixwhynot@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m looking forward to adding it to my browser settings as default search!
JamonBear@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Already doable in Firefox, just right click in the search box then add search engine ;)
happydoors@lemmy.world 2 months ago
PR stunt exposed
NotSteve_@piefed.ca 2 months ago
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?
logi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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?
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 2 months ago
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.
setsubyou@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The article already notes that
privacy-focused users who don’t want “AI” in their search are more likely to use DuckDuckGo
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.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 months ago
It still creeps me out that people use LLMs as search engines nowadays.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 2 months ago
I use kagi assistant. It does a search, summarizes, then gives references to the origin of each claim. Genuinely useful.
gerryflap@feddit.nl 2 months ago
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.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
So you make noai the default, yes?
tamal3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think it’s more like NOOOO.
tehn00bi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I checked mine and it was off, I didn’t need to do anything.
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 2 months ago
Maybe if you close it one time it doesn’t reopen?
Deestan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Meanwhile, at HQ: “The userbase hallucinated that they don’t want AI. Maybe we prompted them wrong?”
sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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.
eksb@programming.dev 2 months ago
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.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And yet it’s opt out, not opt in.
M137@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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?
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They should have asked before including AI in the first place.
letsgo2themall@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I made 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.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
whoa nice! Thanks!
For people trying to configure that in mozilla (I am trying to get away from it but for now :/)
- -> Edit -> Settings -> Search
- "Search Shortcuts" -> Add (to add a search engine)
- “Search Engine Name”: DuckDuckGo Lite
- "URL with %s in place of search term": lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=%25s
- “Keyword (optional)”: @ddgl (or pick whatever you like - it appears @ddg is hardcoded and gets refused)
- -> Save Engine
- scroll up to the top, "Default Search Engine"
- from the dropdown list, select “DuckGuckGo Lite”
Done.
coffee_nutcase207@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s horrible for the environment too and wastes electricity. It’s fucked up that Google makes everything you search an AI search.
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well, Google is an evil megacorp, so not really surprising.
SemiAuto@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Damn didn’t know about this lite version, thanks, also gonna change it into it.
morto@piefed.social 2 months ago
There’s also https://html.duckduckgo.com. It’s like the main page, but without javascript.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 2 months ago
THE AI by default marketing is failing? Shocker
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But the shareholders… /s
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
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.
Young_Gilgamesh@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
MBech@feddit.dk 2 months ago
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 every considered adding AI.
parricc@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Time is sneaking up on us. It’s not even 10 years anymore. It’s closer to 20. 💀
Young_Gilgamesh@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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.
Spaniard@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Google and Microsoft were crap before AI
fleton@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
flameleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t mind the AI overviews, but they shouldn’t show up every time you do a search.
MrKoyun@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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 in a website” like how google used to do. It was so much better.
thegoodyinthehoody@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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
slappyfuck@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
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.
ikirin@feddit.org 2 months ago
I mean you Gotta Hand it to “Ai” - it is very sophisticated, and Ressource intensive predicitive Text.
MutantTailThing@lemmy.world 2 months ago
AI? FuckFuckNo
radio@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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%.
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
I would like to petition to rename AI to
Simulated
Human Intelligence TechnologyNovis@lemdro.id 2 months ago
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?”
roserose56@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Couple months ago, I learned that duckduckgo has settings about disabling AI content. Settings>AI features.
Easy as that.mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.
FirmDistribution@lemmy.world 2 months ago
omfg you don’t say
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I guess they haven’t asked me or it’d be 91%
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 months ago
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.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 2 months ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 months ago
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.
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
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.
98vesselsreptile@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
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
elbiter@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The other 10% are bots
Suavevillain@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
HalfSalesman@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
0x0@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Customer service was sparse before, now it is nonexistent.
58008@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
Image
Magnum@infosec.pub 2 months ago
lol what? Do they have some kind of statement addressing that?
Deckname@olio.cafe 2 months ago
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.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
someone tell them AI isnt good for the environment
NewDay@piefed.social 2 months ago
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.
kevin2107@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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?
sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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. 🤷
PixxlMan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 months ago
Do you believe them? Why?
freeman@feddit.org 2 months ago
Infomaniak?
notthebees@reddthat.com 2 months ago
I’m just happy they give the option to turn off the ai overview as a setting.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 2 months ago
Yeah, luckily it’s very easy to turn off.
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 2 months ago
That’s true for pretty much everything, so not a real argument