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.

I’m looking forward to adding it to my browser settings as default search!

PR stunt exposed

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?

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 think it's more like NOOOO.

I checked mine and it was off, I didn’t need to do anything.

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?

lol what? Do they have some kind of statement addressing that?

someone tell them AI isnt good for the environment

I'm just happy they give the option to turn off the ai overview as a setting.

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. 🤷

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

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 =%25s everytime 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.

It's horrible for the environment too and wastes electricity. It's fucked up that Google makes everything you search an AI search.

Damn didn't know about this lite version, thanks, also gonna change it into it.

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. 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)
2. show that you have the ability to turn off ai on your product in the first place to those who care
3. 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.

Not as easy if you auto-delete your cookies on the closing of your browser.

On duckduckgo.com it's unfortunately enabled by default though. You have to go out of your way to set your search browser to noai.duckduckgo.com if you want default AI disabled (which you'll want on e.g. private browsing windows/any browser that autodeletes cookies when you close it). It's extra hassle because most privacy web browsers use DDG by default, not the noai subdomain.

Companies that can not be trusted to not add features their customers do not want can not be trusted to keep them disabled by default.

If the door to AI exists, we, the users, do not trust the organization to keep it locked.

Google became crap about 10 years ago when they added the product banner in the top, and had the first 5-10 search results be promoted ads. Long before they ever considered adding AI.

Google and Microsoft were crap before AI, I don't remember when google removed the "don't be evil" but at that point they have been crap for a few years already.

Yeah google kinda started sucking a few years before AI went mainstream, the search results took a dive in quality and garbage had already started circulating to the top.

I don’t mind the AI overviews, but they shouldn’t show up every time you do a search.

I have a uBlock filter for those

You can choose how often you want the AI Overwiew to appear! It like asks you the first time you get one in a small pop up. I still think they should instead work on "highlighting relevant text from a website" like how google used to do. It was so much better.

In your settings, first deselect Google as default so you can delete it.

Then go follow this guide