I clicked “NO AI”, and the result page showed “YES AI Thanks for voting — You’re into AI. With DuckDuckGo, you can use it privately.”
Is it because I have cookies off by default, and haven’t whitelisted this site for cookies?
Is it because I have NoScript? I had to allow voteyesornoai.com temporarily in order to see anything other than an orange page.
Yip, allowing that domain to set cookies correctly showed “NO AI Thanks for voting — You’d rather skip AI. With DuckDuckGo, you can, because it’s optional.” after voting.
That’s next-level stupid. Do the people at DDG know that cookies can be deleted, or blocked? Was this site made using AI?
VoteYesOrNoAI.com to save others from typing
I couldn’t find a link to it from DDG’s homepage or blog, but a search gave https://duckduckgo.com/vote which redirects to the above.
…and you posted a picture of a tweet, instead of something with an actual link. I do not understand. I really. Really don’t.
So you don’t have to go to twatter and give meckahitler your attention
Thank you for this. It’s so common, I sometimes forget to be annoyed.
It’s so fucking annoying that I made a post about it.
Goddamit thats not the link I’m after either
I already use noai.duckduckgo.com but I would rather no AI be the default
I just set my settings on fuck fuck go to be no Ai and that was cool
:D
Edit: 15 hours later it is still 93%. I am getting suspicious this isn’t real.
It was 94% when I first looked at it a few days ago
Well. Glad to see I don’t need to bother.
I imagine the cross section of DDG users and people who fucking hate AI is higher than average, but I hope at least that this is somewhat reflective of general public sentiment.
I don’t hate AI as a tool. Especially in narrow, high-impact use-cases.
I work in medicine. I have already seen instances of AI, used as a tool by professionals, helping to literally save lives. The applications in medical research (and many scientific fields probably) are genuinely exciting. AlphaFold won a nobel for a reason. Insanely cool projects like the Human Cell Atlas wouldn’t be possible without it.
The problem is stupid-ass ‘general’ chatbots being forced down everyone’s throats so corpos can hoover up even fucking more of our data and sell more fucking ads.
Even these chatbots can be useful, but I won’t use any that collect data or sell ads.
In this regard I think DDG’s approach is pretty reasonable. You can turn on or off, you can use it without an account, and all queries are anonymized before being sent to the model.
I get that people have a reflexive “fuck AI” reaction because of the way it has been deployed in society. I truly understand it. But honestly that’s more of a capitalism problem than an AI problem. AI is a tool like a hammer. Just because evil corporate pricks are using it to bash our heads in doesn’t mean we should hate hammers, it means we should hate evil corporate pricks.
This is where terminology is an issue. Yes Alpha Fold and Chatgpt are both “AI” but they’re very different technologies underneath. Most people who say “fuck AI” usually just mean the generative AI technologies behind Chatgpt and Sora and such.
The common person doesn’t understand this difference though and probably isn’t even aware of AlphaFold.
Let’s all agree to use the term GenAI for chatbots and other bullshit generators.
I asked grok who said the correct term is “MechaHitler”
Transformer architectures similar to those used in LLMs are the foundation for AlphaFold 2 and medical vision models like Med-ViT. There’s not really a clean way to distinguish “good” and “bad” AI by architecture. It’s all about the use.
It’s a tool. There aren’t any good and bad hammers. Someone using a hammer to build affordable housing is doing a good thing. Someone using a hammer to kill kittens is doing a bad thing. It’s not the fucking hammer’s fault, but it’s also not surprising that if 95% of the people buying hammers are using them to kill kittens and post videos on instagram about it to the point that manufacturers start designing their hammers with specialized kitten-killing features and advertising them for the purpose non-stop, people will get pretty fucking angry at all the stores and peddlers selling these fucking hammers on every street corner.
And that’s where we are with “generative AI” right now. Which is not really AI, by the way, none of this has any “intelligence” of any kind, that’s just a very effective sales tactic for a fundamentally really interesting but currently badly abused technology. It’s all just the world’s largest financial grift. It’s not the technology’s fault.
I work for a health tech AI company and agree, but I also agree that most AI can fuck right off and doesn’t need to be in every god damn thing.
This.
I am anti generative AI. I am agressively anti generative AI. Years ago I saw someone make an AI to tell if a mole was cancerous or not (the modelin question was flawed because it learned if there is a ruler in the photo there was cancer but that’s not the point). An image model trained exclusively to detect cancer moles vs safe moles is a useful first tool that you could just use your phone for before going in for a real test.
The same is true for applications in psychology where for example early warning systems are being tried and studied. But corporate had to focus on a forceful every day application of AI instead of sciences and research.
“Literally save lives,” Bullshit.
I completely get your skepticism, but I was being serious. Yes, at least one life within my organization has literally been saved with the help of an AI drug discovery tool (used by a team of geneticists). I’m not going to get into specifics because nothing from the case has been released publicly (I’m sure a case report will pop up at some point) and I don’t want to get my ass fired, but it’s not a joke that these tools can be incredibly powerful in medicine when used by human experts, including helping to save lives.
My friend does diabetes research and he was using machine learning to analyze tissue samples and the model he built is way more accurate than humans looking at the same material. There are definitely good use cases for ML in medicine.
Yes but ML is not what people mean when they say ”AI” now. They mean LLMs.
I’m seeing 79,264 votes with the same percentages now.
Technically, with 93%, it’s safe to say, that we all feel the same about AI.
Yeah, the Pro-AI vote is getting close to the lizardman constant.
70k+ is a good representation of the users. Plenty of data points they can extrapolate and all of them point to scrapping AI. Good. Save some money and skip the slop trough.
It’s not a survey. It’s an ad. It’s an ad for noai.duckduckgo.com. The fact that we’re thinking it and talking about it means it was a good ad. But it’s just an ad. The numbers are entirely meaningless.
Nothing about this ad says that they are scrapping AI. They aren’t. They still provide AI by default. This is a way for the end user to opt out of that default.
I answered yes to see what happened. It tells me “Thanks for voting — You’re into AI. With DuckDuckGo, you can use it privately. Try Duck.ai”
No idea where they’re going to take it from here, just wanted to provide some insight on the other option.
Next up, from DDG:
“Oops, looks like we lost the data of the voting, so we’ll just assume YES won because everyone loves Copilot AI, which is the best AI and has nothing to do with us having a contract with Microsoft!”
Good, maybe now they can make it opt-in.
I like the part where we’re now pretending they’re “pushing back” on forced AI almost a full year after implementing default, forced AI.
Where was this “norm” a year ago? Did the AI implement itself into DDG’s main page by accident? Were they hacked? /s
It’s fine that they made a mistake including default AI. But it’s long overdue for them to admit that, and have some accountability, and maybe provide an apology, and an explanation. Instead, we get this milquetoast “Some people like it, some people don’t, we weren’t wrong it must’ve been you guys who changed your minds, but we’re the good guys here, because now we’re asking you!” gaslighting.
With all due respect, fuck you, duckduckgo.
Link for the lazy: https://voteyesornoai.com/
Huh, 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.
First of all, the vote is from last week, so no measures have been taken yet. The vote is still live.
Secondly I think it was more of an ad for their AI, that backfired, because if I remember correctly, the “no” answer didn’t provide the link to noai.duckduckgo.com when I first answered.
Lastly, I hope that this does change some minds in their C-suite. Having no AI as a standard would be a good start, but them filtering AI images is actually a bonus. This should be expanded upon.
Maybe this poll is to see if they should switch it to off by default?
The lazy, of course, being OP who went through the trouble to… post a picture instead of anything useful.
Thank you!
I’m doing my part :)
BTW you can see the absolute results or broken down by country and US state here
Just a small note, in uBlock Origin there is a blocklist named “EasyList - AI Widgets” that seems to work fine, at least with Google. It also has entries for duckduckgo.com.
To get there:
- Firefox,
- application menu ≡ (or from menu: Tools),
- Extensions and themes,
- to the right of uBlock Origin, click the …,
- Preferences,
- Filter lists (at the top),
- scroll down to Annoyances,
- under EasyList - Annoyances
- you can select EasyList - AI Suggestions
After completing the survey, and of course wanting NO AI, DuckDuckGo of course suggested using their “no AI” search engine, bragging that “We’ve Turned Off AI‑Assisted Answers” and “We’ve Removed AI‑Generated Images.” The #2 result on my first rather bland search was Grokipedia.
I just had the same experience. The amount of effort it takes to act ethically and stay away from literal stinking piles of toxic waste every time you need to use the computer for anything is insane. Most common browser - AI, search engine - AI, messaging app - AI, phone - AI, TV - AI. And I use the term “AI” quite liberally here at best meaning machine learning and at worst a LLM.
Took them a while. (Probably after countless feedback submissions criticizing it)
Them having it enabled by default actually made me switch off of them. I’m Trying out startpage currently and it doesn’t seem terribly bad.
I find the Kagi implementation interesting. You will only get AI results if you end your query with “?”.
“How do I make cornbread” = search results for cornbread recipes.
“How do I make cornbread?” = AI generated recipe response.
Can you kindly fuck off?
No, no, no! The question mark calls the AI slop genie! Now you’ve done it.
Kagi also has an option to turn that feature off! :-)
This is cool. I’d also be interested what people’s primary reason for voting the way they did is. I think for me it’s an environmental thing. I could get used to ignoring ai results at the top, but knowing those use so much electricity to also serve me something I rarely find useful is gross.
For me, it’s an efficiency/reliability standpoint. As when I’m searching, I’m looking for what I want, not what something thinks I want. Also, once you learn of the switches and how to phrase a query, you generally can get what you are looking for (if it even exists) within the first few results.
There are times and places I think AI is or would be kind of useful. But every company being like “Yes AI by default!!! Haha no you can’t turn it off” means that I would rather just have No AI, if I can’t have “No AI, but a way to access AI when I would like to”.
