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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/co…

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.

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

The best way I've found to avoid AI is, sadly, to use the before:date search option and limit my search to sites created before 2023. There are plugins that do it for you automatically.

It obviously doesn't help if you want current events or the dankest of fresh memes. (Freshest of dank memes?) But if the information you want hasn't changed much in the last few years, the difference is night and day.