Technology

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.

On DuckDuckGo that is unsurprising

Even without AI, you can’t find Neocities sites there because DuckDuckGo relies on Bing.

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.

A massive underestimation

I think most people find something like chatgpt and copilot useful in their day to day lives. LLMs are a very helpful and powerful technology. However, most people are against these models collecting every piece of data imaginable from you. People are against the tech, they're against the people running the tech.

I don't think most people would mind if a FOSS LLM, that's designed with privacy and complete user control over their data, was integrated with an option to completely opt out. I think that's the only way to get people to trust this tech again and be onboard.