The privacy-focused search engine is asking the public where they stand on AI, arguing that AI features should always be optional.
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They’re missing the point, I think. We don’t want an opt out, we want them to stop investing in AI altogether. I don’t care that they have a “no ai” engine, I want to support companies who don’t fall to the destructive AI hype.
Ah shit, this is where they build legitimacy for whatever the hell they want to do.
Well the results are mostly NO AI at the moment so whatever they want to do should be headed towards that
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)
Boy howdy, do I have just the script for you!
https://pypi.org/project/clanker_score/
Full disclosure: It doesn’t work. But the idea is nice: … that you could — perhaps in real life — identify AI-generated content. … so I wrote a framework that purports to do that.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately none of these distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
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100%. Products and services that can filter out Ai slop will make so much money in the coming years. Users want valuable information and content, not recycled slop.
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
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.
Nobody actually posted the link to the poll?
Here ya go.
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.
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?
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
So I think it is fundamental to distinguish
versus
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
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1qerho4/duckduckgo_official_survey_say_yes_or_no_to_ai/nzzs2xb/
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.
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.
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.
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
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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:
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 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.