Honestly, I'm surprised. Was expecting something close to 50/50 or maybe 40% yes, 60% no but this is hilarious and heartening:
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
355 points (99.7% liked)
Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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You'd probably get a closer split with the general population, but for a search engine mainly used by privacy-conscious people and those wanting to get away from Google's bullshit, it makes sense.
Honestly, it was probably an ad in disguise. You want AI? We've got it! Don't want that bullshit? That's cool, we're not gonna shove it down your throat.
An ad that actually tells you some info after asking for info is honestly refreshing
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It's a little ironic because all the searches just go through Microslop's bullshit instead. Yes, DuckDuckGo is just Bing wearing a duck hat.
Better a proxy for Bing than Bing itself
I did not know that, so no better than startpage, a netherlands based privacy minded proxy for google?
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Did my part.
Currently same split showing, 96% against, 4% for, but with just over 5400 votes. :)
"We don't all feel the same way about AI."
Literally 95% of users: uh, yeah we kinda do.
"Thanks for voting — You’d rather skip AI. With DuckDuckGo, you can, because it’s optional."
It shouldn't even be an option, AI Has no fucking business being shoved into anything. Just stop.
Honestly, this comment and the link to a separate URL specifically for our kind was the first time I have felt negative towards DDG. Clearly whoever wrote that had gone through a couple of passes of softening the language because they were overly defensive toward the no-AI crowd.
Maybe make the 96% crowd the default and the 4% option opt-in.
Not sure I’m surprised. Besides the reasons other people mentioned, I think there’s another factor influencing it.
I suspect a lot of “Yes AI” voters are really thinking “well, it’s kinda neat”. But us “No AI” voters are really thinking “HELL NO!!! Under no circumstances do we want AI!”
I’m guessing that makes us a lot more motivated to respond.
To add to that, those saying yes are acting almost materialistically, “why not have more when it’s free”.
I am genuinely curious what percentage of the mainstream population is willing to pay for AI.
Something tells me we are finding out soon.
I know several middle school teachers that have been paying for ChatGPT for a couple years now. There are a lot more, I would imagine.
I thought ai was all free as they grew market share? Just for advanced features?
It has made my experience with DDG immeasurably worse. It's not necessarily that the results are bad, but the performance impact is completely unacceptable.
Don't use the AI then. That's kind of the point of this poll/marketing-campaign, to show it can easily be turned off for DDG.
NoAI should be the default version and the people that want it can go to ai.duckduckgo(.)com
Yeah, absolutely.
Currently the default is the AI being on. It’s why I personally changed search engines for my browser because I don’t want the damn AI
Same here. I'm using noai.duckduckgo.com as the default address and it's working great for me, should you ever decide to return. Some slop articles get through but not many and now I get no AI images at all as far as I can tell. I also have the huge AI blocklist going so I couldn't tell you which is helping more, but it never stopped the AI images and noai.duckduckgo.com absolutely does.
Some AI pics truly creep me out; it's that uncanny valley thing. For me a hint of it is somehow even worse than having an image that is obviously, overtly AI. It is such a relief to open an image search and not see a bunch of unnatural shite that only puts the hair on the back of my neck up.
I was hoping that block list was going to include AI generated articles. It's just images though sadly. I don't like the use of AI images, but they also generally don't waste my time. When I read an article, only to realize it's made up AI bullshit, that wastes a lot of time.
That's fair. Just wanted to point it out to the user I replied to, who seemingly still uses it but doesn't realize they don't need to have that worse experience.
Unless one makes sure to stay logged into DDG you’re always going to get the default. So for all intents and purposes yeah you do “need.” To use the worst experience.
Nope. It saves your settings across searches. You can also use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/, no need to login.
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There are people genuinely believe that they want to handle all personal data to AI and it would be good for them. However, those people tend not to use DDG. So it's self-selecting the audience.
Nice. 94-6% now with over 18,000 votes.
Same but at 29k just now
Remember what you saw before the results will be "fixed".
FR I can see the AI Tech Bros working on a bot to submit votes as we speak.
Uh-oh, nobody show this to Jensen Huang, it would break his little heart.
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They literally can't help themselves lol
Proud "no" voter chiming in.
I don't need a pin. I put my vote in. It's 97-3 now on my screen with 1072 votes in... is lemmy 1% of this sample now?
Ah this warms my heart ❤️
It's currently at 97% No, because I just visited it to get the link to a No AI DuckDuckGo. As those gassed up LLMs known as "AI" are a blight upon the tech space, so many CEOs are making the world a sloppier place; what's worse some people are buying in to this "AI" nonsense. 🤬
Funny. I just started looking into Kagi because Duck Duck Go's AI results have completely ruined the search engine.
I mean, this is naturally going to be lopsided. Most people probably just don't care. And the people who do will brigade the voting (like is happening in this thread).
TBF a lot of us regularly use DuckDuckGo and did not see or know about the poll, so it's not like we're going into somebody else's space to "brigade".
I use DDG and didn’t know of it until I saw it here.
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