- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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As much as I agree with this poll, duck duck go is a very self selecting audience. The number doesn’t actually mean much statistically.
If the general public knew that “AI” is much closer to predictive text than intelligence they might be more wary of it
There was no implication that this was a general poll designed to demonstrate the general public’s attitudes. I’m not sure why you mentioned this.
Because that’s how most people implicitly frame headlines like this one: a generalization of the public
I mean you Gotta Hand it to “Ai” - it is very sophisticated, and Ressource intensive predicitive Text.
The poll didn’t even ask a real question. “Yes AI or no AI?” No context.
I would like to petition to rename AI to
Simulated
Human
Intelligence
Technologyor: computer rendered anonymized plagiarism
It’s funny but it still lies about intelligence
‘Intelligence’ is a measure, not an absolute. Human intelligence can range anywhere from genius to troglodyte. But you’re right, still not human, still at very best simulated, and isn’t capable of reason, just the illusion of reason.
On public transit, it bottoms out.
I would like to petition to rename AI to
Fucking stupid and useless
FSAU? That’s not a word.
Tell me you don’t know shit about LLMs without telling me so:
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.
ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees
That is a tiny fraction of a rounding error for a company that size. And it doesn’t come anywhere near being just compensation for the stress and loss of time it likely caused.
There should be some kind of general punitive “you tried to screw over a customer or the general public” fee defined as a fraction of the companies’ revenue. Could be waived for small companies if the resulting sum is too small to be worth the administrative overhead.
It’s a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.
It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot’s fault. With this ruling, it’s the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they’re misled by the chatbot. That’s excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.
Definitely agree, there should have been some punitive damages for making them go through that while they were mourning.
…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
I am explicitly against the use case probably being thought of by many of the respondents - the “ai summary” that pops in above the links of a search result. It is a waste if I didn’t ask for it, it is stealing the information from those pages, damaging the whole WWW, and ultimately, gets the answer horribly wrong enough times to be dangerous.
Google became crap ever since they added AI. Microsoft became crap ever since they added AI. OpenAI started losing money the moment they started working on AI. Coincidence? I think not!
Rational people don’t want Abominable Intelligence anywhere near them.
Personally, I don’t mind the AI overviews, but they shouldn’t show up every time you do a search. That’s just a waste of energy.
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.
Time is sneaking up on us. It’s not even 10 years anymore. It’s closer to 20. 💀
I guess. And then they removed the “Don’t be evil” motto just to drive the point home.
But you have to agree, the company DID become even worse once they started using AI.
Oh absolutely. It’s just important to remember that they’ve been horrible for a long time, and has shown more ads in a single search than your average 30 minute youtube video.
Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don’t have competitors, you don’t have to work as hard to provide search results – especially if you’re actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they’re interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn’t responsible for the decline of search quality.
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.
- They got rid of that motto in 2018. And you could theoretically argue that Google was getting worse since its conception in 1998.
Indeed Young_Gilgamesh
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 mind them. Nobody at my workplace scrolls beyond the AI overview and every single one of the overviews they quote to me about technical issues are wrong, 100%. Not even an occasional “lucky guess”.
Good for you. I Meant as a design choice for a search engine. Why waste electricity?
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.
I did not know that. Never noticed a pop up. And does this work with both search engines? You can turn off the AI features on DuckDuckGo with like two clicks, but I can’t seem to find the option on Google.
I was talking about DDG because I thought you were talking about DDG in the last part. I dont think you can turn off AI completely on Google.
I have found a couple times an LLM being good for searches. My example is scooters in the US, because of commute I’d like to find an electric scooter, the kind like a Vespa. But you do a search, you find all sorts about the standing scooters, look for electric motorcycles and they start getting to car level prices or aren’t street legal, it gets to be a mess. Chat GPT turned that search into a relatively quick one that I could find a local place that I’m going to check out when there’s not ice on the ground. But the important part was making it require links. As a tool, it can have its uses.
So all of that said… Google and other searches doing AI did fuck all and nothing to help on this, and I agree 100% I do not want AI on the search for DDG
Okay, so that’s not what the article says. It says that 90% of respondents don’t want AI search.
Moreover, the article goes into detail about how DuckDuckGo is still going to implement AI anyway.
Seriously, titles in subs like this need better moderation.
The title was clearly engineered to generate clicks and drive engagement. That is not how journalism should function.
That is the title from the news article. It might not be how good journalism would work, but copying the title of the source is pretty standard in most news aggregator communities.
Unless I’m mistaken this title is generated to match the title at the link. Are you saying the mods should update titles to accurately reflect the content of the articles posted?
Also, Duck Duck Go is a search engine. What other ai would it do?
It has a separate llm chat interface, and you can disable the ai summary that comes up on web search results.
Well, that’s how journalism has always functioned. People call it “clickbait” as if it’s something new, but headlines have always been designed to grab your attention and get you to read.
It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.
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:
- 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.
I guess they haven’t asked me or it’d be 91%
You’ve been learning statistics from an LLM, haven’t you?
I’m a proud graduate from the Terrence Howard school of math.
Had to look him up. Gold.
1 * 1 = 2, because reasons
This guy knows the SHIT out of statistics!
deleted by creator
As a DuckDuckGo user who uses claude and ChatGPT every day, I don’t want AI features in duck duck go because I probably would never use them. So many companies are adding chatbot features and most of them can’t compete with the big names. Why would I use a bunch of worse LLMs and learn a bunch of new interfaces when I can just use the ones I’m already comfortable with
The other 10% are bots
I would have no problem with AI if it could be useful.
The problem is no matter how many times I’m promised otherwise it cannot automate my job and talk to the idiots for me. It just hallucinates a random gibberish which is obviously unhealthful.
I’ve found it useful for a few things. I had had a song intermittently stuck in my head for a few years and had unsuccessfully googled it a few times. Couldn’t remember artist, name, lyrics (it was in a language I don’t speak) - and chatGPT got it in a couple of tries. Things that I’m too vague about to be able to construct a search prompt and want to explore. Stuff like that. I just don’t trust it with anything that I want actual facts for.
Yep, preparing a proper search is my use case. Like “how is this special screw called?”. I can describe the screw and tell the model to provide me a list of how that screw could be called.
Then I can search for the terms of that list and one of the terms is the correct one. It’s way better than hoping that somebody described the screw in the same words in some obscure forum.
But, is it worth to burn the planet, make RAM, GPUs, hard drives unaffordable for everybody and probably crash the world economy for a better screw search? I doubt it.
The thing is Google was already pretty good at that before things like chat GPT came out.
I remember many years ago I searched for “that movie where they steal a painting by changing the temperature” and Google got it on the first hit. That was way before AI.
It’s really good at answering customer questions for me, to be honest.
But, I still have to okay it. Just in case. There’s no trust.
However that still does take a lot less bandwidth for me because I’m not good at the customer facing aspects of my business.
I still would, as the increased productivity, once again, does not lead to reduced hours. Always more productive, always locked into a bullshit schedule.
Prompt or model issue my dude
Or you’re one of the few who have a pretty niche job
Just things like different words or vocabulary, or helping with some code related knowledge, Linux issues… or even random known knowledge that you happen not to know
I think LLMs are also just genuinely not as universally useful as expected. Everyone thinks it can automate every job except their own not because everyone thinks their job is special but because they know all the intricate parts of that job that LLMs are still really bad at.
For instance AI could totally do my job at a surface level but it quickly devolves into deal breaking caveats which I am lumping into very broad categories to save time:
- Output would look good (great even) but not actually be useable in most applications
- Output cannot even begin to be optimized in the same way humans can optimize it
- It would take more effort for to fix these than to just do the whole thing on my own to begin with
Case in point for me. AI cannot write documentation for new technical procedures because by definition they are new procedures. The information is not in its knowledge base, because I haven’t written it yet.
helping with some code related knowledge, Linux issues
I’m sorry but why the absolute flaming fuck does everyone assume that programming is the only job in the universe?
There are entire industries that don’t revolve around Linux. It’s amazing but not everyone in the world has to care about programming. Everyone needs to stop telling me that AI is good at programming. Firstly because it isn’t, it’s good damn awful. Secondly because I’m not a programmer, so I don’t care.
I’m sorry but why the absolute flaming fuck does everyone assume that programming is the only job in the universe?
I’m just giving examples I relate to, and describe my use of it
Firstly because it isn’t, it’s good damn awful. Secondly because I’m not a programmer, so I don’t care.
That explains why you think it’s awful at it then. You just believe the haters because you have confirmation bias. Fact is companies and people wouldn’t use it to code if it wasn’t good at that
It’s perfect for summaries, known general knowledge, correcting text, roleplay, repetitive tasks and some logic problems…
You just believe the haters because you have confirmation bias.
Well if by that you mean I’ve used it and it’s crap, then yeah, I’ve confirmed it.
Most objective article (sarcasm)
In fact it has a whole-ass “AI” chatbot product, Duck.ai, which is bundled in with DuckDuckGo’s privacy VPN for $10 a month
Oh, I meet you again. I haven’t logged in for a long time 😅
Hi :)
I’ve been much more inactive than before as well
I lost my SimpleX profile haha But to be honest I don’t like too much it. IRC, XMPP, DeltaChat are better options for me. They’re more popular and good for privacy also, but of course SimpleX is more focused on privacy :)
Sure, use what you want :)
And at least they’re not owned by a transphobic moron, but that’s how things are
I don’t use it much either, but mainly cuz there’s no one to speak to
Configure your bouncer and hop on IRC! We can meet on libera.chat I’m on the same boat, I also don’t have anyone to speak too. But on IRC you have a lot of channels available where you can join and talk with the others.
What’s wrong about this?
Nothing if disclosed and you’re okay with it. Else, opinions and partiality get in the way of truth and facts
Is there a way to get Firefox/Librewolf to have noai.duckduckgo.com set as the default search engine in settings? I can’t find a way to set a custom link for something like that.
In your settings, first deselect Google as default so you can delete it.
Then go follow this guide
wow, Firefox can do this natively now? I’ve been using an addon for so many years
Thank you. It’s nice to browse search results with one less annoyance again.
Even that I would consider wildly unjust. User data would HAVE to be opt IN.
AI is not impressive or worth all the trade offs and worse quality of life. It is decent in some areas but mostly grifter tech.
It IS an impressive tech
An impressive grift
It really isn’t. Gen AI is trash. AI art and music are slop. The only place is is decent is with data and some coding basics and vibe coding leads to security issues.
And roleplay, and correcting text, and finding ideas, and explaining school stuff, and finding potential bugs…
Strongly disagree with you
