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.
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.
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.
Asking an existing userbase for any kind of change will pretty much always result in a no.
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.
and 45% of those replies were A.I.
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.
1 * 1 = 2, because reasons
Had to look him up. Gold.
Is this from the “poll” where you could click “Yes AI” or “No AI” without any further context or explanation on what the question even implies. Yes the marketing stunt works but that’s not a poll one should cite.
Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t want AI slop in my results but this “poll” is just marketing.
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.
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%.
People are fucking weird and they can’t be trusted.I can guarantee you 90% voted no AI yet nobody will use noai.duckduckgo.com
Remember subreddits going dark and people leaving reddit. Hahaha how did that work out ?
Remember subreddits going dark and people leaving reddit. Hahaha how did that work out ?
Great, we’re here. I had to double check i was on the fediverse because of your comment.
God! You’re people too dumb. I am glad President Trump is our president
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.
The point being is they will cry “nobody asked for AI” but will still use it. I know many 9-5s subscribed to chatgpt paying $20-30 each month yet going around telling everyone how they hate AI and people shouldn’t use it.
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.
Shutup you poor 9-5 ! Nobody cares about you.
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.
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”
Remember subreddits going dark and people leaving reddit. Hahaha how did that work out ?
We are on lemmy now, so I don’t get your point here.
Lemmy is far superior to Reddit.
You might be in IT support. You dont need to understand. Get back to work. Fix that cable under the desk
I’ll take comments that make no sense for 1,000 Alex.
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?
I have yet to use chatgpt.
Not trying to promote the use of AI here, but being proud of not using something and having any opinion on it at the same time is very follow the herd in ignorance vibe.
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?
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.
Don’t do heroin, kids.
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.
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.
That’s true for pretty much everything, so not a real argument
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. 🤷
Infomaniak?
Yes. :)
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.
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 ^^"
Yeah that reminds me of the data centres hogging green energy that was meant for households
That’s actually a very good point, thanks!
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.
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.
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”
At this point, not having AI would be a selling point.
I wish they would have talked about how many teees you need to offset an ecosia AI search
And make AI opt-in rather than opt-out so Ecosia can educate their users
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
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?
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
