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DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI
(www.pcworld.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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The article already notes that
But the opposite is also true. Maybe it’s not 90% to 10% elsewhere, but I’d expect the same general imbalance because some people who would answer yes to ai in a survey on a search web site don’t go to search web sites in the first place. They go to ChatGPT or whatever.
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.
It still creeps me out that people use LLMs as search engines nowadays.
For some issues, especially related to programming and Linux, I feel like I kinda have to at this point. Google seems to have become useless, and DDG was never great to begin with but is arguably better than Google now. I've had some very obscure issues that I spent quite some time searching for, only to drop it into ChatGPT and get a link to some random forum post that discusses it. The biggest one was a Linux kernel regression that was posted on the same day in the Arch Linux forums somewhere. Despite having a hunch about what it could be and searching/struggling for over an hour, I couldn't find anything. ChatGPT then managed to link me the post (and a suggested fix: switching to LTS kernel) in less than minute.
For general purpose search tho, hell no. If I want to know factual data that's easy to find I'll rely on the good old search engine. And even if I have to use an LLM, I don't really trust it unless it gives me links to the information or I can verify that what it says is true.
I'm seeing almost daily the fuck-ups resulting from somebody trying to fix something with ChatGPT, then coming to the forums because it didn't work.
I agree that happens, but it has nothing to do with what op said. They didn't want a solution, they wanted a link to where the problem was being discussed so they could work out a solution.
People seem to really confure the difference between asking an llm how to patch a boat vs where did people discuss ways to patch a boat.