omfg you don’t say
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.
that was why i started using ddg
and 45% of those replies were A.I.
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.
When Air Canada’s chatbot gave incorrect information to a traveller, the airline argued its chatbot is “responsible for its own actions”.
Artificial intelligence is having a growing impact on the way we travel, and a remarkable new case shows what AI-powered chatbots can get wrong – and who should pay. In 2022, Air Canada’s chatbot promised a discount that wasn’t available to passenger Jake Moffatt, who was assured that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother’s funeral and then apply for a bereavement fare after the fact.
According to a civil-resolutions tribunal decision last Wednesday, when Moffatt applied for the discount, the airline said the chatbot had been wrong – the request needed to be submitted before the flight – and it wouldn’t offer the discount. Instead, the airline said the chatbot was a “separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions”. Air Canada argued that Moffatt should have gone to the link provided by the chatbot, where he would have seen the correct policy.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees
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.
ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees
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.
But the shareholders… /s
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
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?
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.
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 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.
Shutup you poor 9-5 ! Nobody cares about you.
To be honest, I think most don’t know about noai.duckduckgo.com – at least I didn’t.
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.
Also, lots have apps have the main duckduckgo as a search option. I’ve not seen any have the noai as an option.
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.
Don’t do heroin, kids.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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”
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. 🤷
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.
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.
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 ^^"
I’m just happy they give the option to turn off the ai overview as a setting.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
