- cross-posted to:
- goodnewseveryone@piefed.social
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- goodnewseveryone@piefed.social
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.
I am fairly sure this is the actual point of the campaign. The selection bias for a ‘poll’ like this (one that instantly on-boards you to the ai-disabled version of your product if you click answer negative, no less) is so great that I don’t believe the suits/analysts at ddg ever envisioned a different result. Polls and comment sections lure the extreme viewpoints and the ddg crowd already skews privacy-conscious so this was a highly expected outcome.
What the campaign does instead is:
- Show that you ‘care’ and ‘listen to feedback’ (by a response to the poll somewhere between disabling the ai by default to making the no-ai button a little bit bigger)
- show that you have the ability to turn off ai on your product in the first place to those who care
- like I said above, directly onboard people onto their preferred search strategy so that when relatives/friends send this around people get a little taste, and realize this exists
It’s quite clever imo, and there’s no real bad outcome for what I assume is a pretty inexpensive campaign.
If they take the poll to heart it can still be a sucess. They can advertise that they listened to their users and changed course.
That’s the thing about really good marketing - it should not only drive users to use your service, but the reactions to that marketing can be used as market research to improve your product and future marketing in a manner that drives even more users to your product.
Customer service was sparse before, now it is nonexistent.
AI? FuckFuckNo
Yeah. I’m actually kind of upset that I have to type ‘noai’. That should be the standard.
I’m looking forward to adding it to my browser settings as default search!
Already doable in Firefox, just right click in the search box then add search engine ;)
Just edit the ddg entry instead of adding a new one. It’s super easy to change the url for the search in settings.
I don’t know how you do that. I can’t edit the standard DDG on desktop at all. Didn’t see anything at first glance in about:config either.
Easier to me to just add a new engine.
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?
Here’s a link to the Disable AI firefox plugin. Works on mobile and desktop.
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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.
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.
PR stunt exposed
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?
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.
How dare they charge money instead of selling data or ads!?
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
Guess I’m in the 10%
You want to destroy our planet and pay way more in electricity for a random sentence generator to spit out slop?
You’ve managed to be wrong 4 times in one sentence, that’s impressive
There’s noai.duckduckgo.com and lite.duckduckgo.com to help you use DDG without this ai stuff and without having to fiddle with settings. Especially helpful if you frequently open private tabs and then the settings get cleared on normal DDG.
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Even without AI, you can’t find Neocities sites there because DuckDuckGo relies on Bing.
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.
sure but there was no way that wouldn’t have been thrown out.
But the shareholders… /s
Blatantly misleading title. Makes it sounds like it encompassed more than just search engines.
I made https://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.
It’s horrible for the environment too and wastes electricity. It’s fucked up that Google makes everything you search an AI search.
Well, Google is an evil megacorp, so not really surprising.
Damn didn’t know about this lite version, thanks, also gonna change it into it.
There’s also https://html.duckduckgo.com. It’s like the main page, but without javascript.
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”:
https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=%25s(this has to be=%s, lemmy keeps mutilating that to=%25severytime I save my post) - “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.
I have yet to use chatgpt.
deleted by creator
Don’t do heroin, kids.
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.
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?
…a piece of software that has encouraged suicide, and is proven to create psychosis?
Yeah, it’s just software. My dudes.
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.
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.
I Prefer searx
Do you also use Arch btw?
Arch based on laptop , phone is grapheneos and lineage🤔
Nice
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.
