Are You YES AI or No AI?
25 points by audience_mem 20 hours ago | 38 comments
  • subdavis 19 hours ago |
    I love a poll that doesn’t tell me what I’m voting for. I can only assume this is an advertisement stunt and not intended to collect any data?
    • namrog84 18 hours ago |
      At least for me it tells me about some options to use ai privately for duckduckgo so I assume it's from them. Possibly collecting views for Ai generated search results.
    • antonvs 18 hours ago |
      Yes, it seems to be DuckDuckGo advertising that they'll let you control the use of AI in searches rather than foisting it on you by default the way e.g. Google does.
    • csande17 18 hours ago |
      It's an advertisement for noai.duckduckgo.com, a version of DuckDuckGo that disables the AI features and tries to filter out AI-generated content. (Or, if you choose "yes", it's an advertisement for DuckDuckGo's AI features.)
    • thr0waway001 18 hours ago |
      GABBO! GABBO! GABBO!
    • blochist 18 hours ago |
      Aside from the fact that it kind of obviously is if you "vote" the fact that it says "Not sure yet? That's okay — vote anyway!" is kind of a give-away that this isn't going to produce anything like rigorously useful data on the question (it produces a lot of other data though!)
  • armonster 19 hours ago |
    I think my stance for AI definitely somewhere between these two options. A sentiment I often see is being staunchly anti-AI in any way, and I'm definitely not that. I feel like that is the more useful divide too, anti-AI vs open to AI. Being open to AI doesn't mean being one of those 'full steam ahead' on anything and everything AI though.
  • wesselbindt 19 hours ago |
    What does either option even mean?
    • MrOrelliOReilly 18 hours ago |
      One means Yes and one means No, this should be clear!!

      /s

    • antonvs 18 hours ago |
      "Yes AI" means you're in favor of using AI for absolutely everything, including making court decisions, medical decisions, etc.

      "No AI" means you're against using AI for anything, and oh by the way that includes all technology previously identified as AI, including various search, pathfinding, scheduling, and planning techniques; rule-based systems; logic programming; knowledge representaion; clustering; computer vision; and robotic control. If you're in the "No AI" camp, you need to immediately reformat your hard disk and then microwave your computer, or risk being branded a traitor.

      And no, there is no middle ground. Pick a side!

  • lukev 19 hours ago |
    What a horribly reductive question.

    I would hope we can engage these questions with a little subtlety, rather than just "picking a team."

    • gizajob 18 hours ago |
      I would hope not.
    • embedding-shape 18 hours ago |
      I saw your comment, thought "This person must have not checked the website, can't be just a yes or no question because that'd be so misleading"

      Clicks on the page.

      [Yes] - [No]

      I think it serves as a beautiful visualization of everything that is wrong in the world today. Not because of the question, nor the answers, but because of thinking something like that can just be divided into "Agree" and "Disagree" and somehow think that's a good idea.

    • slantedview 18 hours ago |
      The snap judgement is what makes it fun.
  • ismailmaj 18 hours ago |
    Only after voting I understood it was related to duckduckgo....
  • nashashmi 18 hours ago |
    Can someone clarify this strong position against AI? That it be completely without AI? AI is a great option, but sucks as your only option. I think this true in reverse as well.
    • ozlikethewizard 16 hours ago |
      Because as consumers we already dont have a choice, if the only options are AI forced down my throat (Windows, search, surveillance, phones, you name it) or no AI, Im going no AI.

      Thats without considering negative externalities of resource cost, operational cost, and the complete flooding of the shared internet commons with low quality slop.

  • rdiddly 18 hours ago |
    LOL currently 93% "no."
    • embedding-shape 18 hours ago |
      I'm "kind of yes AI" and use it everyday, mostly for programming, for other stuff too, been doing for years. People on HN would probably call me "AI zealot", considering I have nuance with my opinions.

      So obviously I voted "No", because that's closer to what I do, than "Yes". I can imagine lots of the "No" votes are like this.

  • racl101 18 hours ago |
    Not sure what these options mean exactly. So for those reasons, I'm out.

    -- Barbara

  • nashashmi 18 hours ago |
    TL;DC: This is an ad for duck, one with AI, and the other without.
  • dpmdpm 18 hours ago |
    Are you YES sampling bias or NO sampling bias?
  • KPGv2 18 hours ago |
    I'm a NO on AI that replaces artists (there's no such thing as "AI art"). I'm a YES on pretty much everything else.
  • FatherOfCurses 18 hours ago |
    I'm sure we will see lots of hand-wringing here on Ycombinator about the results, which will completely miss the point of how many people in the real world are sick of how overhyped AI is and the negative impacts that hype is having. The tech industry's obsession with AI is souring a lot of people on it because adoption/promotion isn't happening organically.
    • embedding-shape 18 hours ago |
      I haven't seen a single ad from ChatGPT here in Spain, yet everywhere I go, there are tons of people using ChatGPT for all kinds of stuff. Last time I saw it in the wild, it was the person who was giving me the keys to a car I wanted to test drove, that was using ChatGPT and had it opened on their computer.

      Seemingly to me, adoption is happening without ads or promotion, how do you explain away this?

      FWIW, I wouldn't say I'm "YES AI" nor "NO AI", but I do use LLMs daily to programming.

  • elicash 18 hours ago |
    For folks wondering what this does, it brings you to either:

    https://noai.duckduckgo.com

    or to

    https://yesai.duckduckgo.com/#chat

  • akhil08agrawal 18 hours ago |
    I don't know if I can really trust the data. 93% of 40k+ votes are NO AI. How is that possible. I am not sure if I would like to go back to time when I couldn't code or when I had to do all the labourious work of writing test cases on my own. Now, my time is free to build more 0 to 1 ideas, faster and more effectively.
    • embedding-shape 18 hours ago |
      > I don't know if I can really trust the data. 93% of 40k+ votes are NO AI. How is that possible.

      You give a question that requires nuance, forces it into a 50/50 situation and then you'll have everyone in the middle defaulting to "No" since it's closer than "Yes". Then use that as evidence for everyone hating AI.

    • uyzstvqs 18 hours ago |
      It's extremely easy to bot. One person can easily vote thousands of times with a simple script.
    • Const-me 17 hours ago |
      Software developers might be majority here in HN comments, but definitely a small minority across general population. A lot of people are negatively affected by AI: computer hardware is expensive because AI companies bought all memory, Windows 11 is crap because Microsoft reworked their operating system into AI-driven trojan horse, many people lost jobs because AI companies convinced top management of their employers’ people will be replaced with computers any day now, etc.
  • Zambyte 18 hours ago |
    I use AI (LLMs) all the time, but I use it very intentionally. I don't reach to it for everything.

    A while ago I was paying for both Kagi Ultimate and Perplexity Premium to see which one fit my needs better. I ended up dropping my Perplexity subscription in favor of Kagi Ultimate, because Perplexity often lead me down rabbitholes of trying to beat the LLM into submission, where dropping to a simple keyword search would short circuit such loops.

    Sometimes LLM assisted search helps me get to the information I want faster. It can be nice to be able to provide lots of context to narrow down your query to specifically what you need, in ways that do not work with keyword searches.

    Sometimes keyword searches get me to the information I want faster, especially when I know there are specific resources where I'll find the information I want, such as looking at the documentation for a specific version of something, or some any kind of information that decays over time.

  • 1970-01-01 18 hours ago |
    Ah yes, the next layer in questioning the human technology department. I'd like to speak to the manager of technology. We have some other important questions that you haven't answered;

    "Are you yes or no on Internet?"

    "Are you yes or no on electricity?"

    "Are you yes or no on fire?"

  • Torwald 18 hours ago |
    I am definitely "no" on anything if I didn't ask for it.

    Almost as good as a link to the relevant CXDC comic:

    https://characterdatabase.org/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_Offic...

  • Yemoshino 18 hours ago |
    I feel like discussiong ai with people who hated the seat belt, enjoyed smoking inside, giving babies alcohol and doing operations on babies because they couldn't feel pain.

    So many more people have clear stances against AI but the energy consumption of bitcoin was seldomly a hotly debated topic.

    Lets be clear, technology advances. You can embrace it and learn it and use it, or you lose.

    For me most shocking thing is: I wouldn't have expected so many people getting AI wrong or not getting it at all. 20 Years of software engineering and i have never experienced a technology so weird and crazy and with such a fast progress than AI/ML/Neural Networks.

    Is it perfect? No. But if you would have asked ANYONE just a few years back "Hey i give you a 100 Million dollars, you will write some software however you like and I expect it to be able to solve any problem (an easy one for the start) but i will not tell you what it will be" we would have build something like IBM Watson and it would have just failed.

    but we have a breakthrough in neural networks progress. I can ask it in german, in english, in shitty english and shitty german. I can generate any picture i want, i can generate videos.

    This technology bridges computer and human. Its the FIRST TIME EVER I could build something like a Star Trek Computer.

    Just think this 5 or 20 years further and its clear that these models will be better, relevant better than today. You will (if still needed) be able to stand in a VR world and talk to a computer and it will understand you well enough and it will be able to generate what ever you want.

    Of course we still need to solve a lot more issues but honestly, before ChatGPT it felt like we solved software but it was not clear how it will continue. There was something missing.

    And the way we build out compute, can be a milestone for material science, pharma, biochemistry etc.

    "No AI" come on

    • ozlikethewizard 16 hours ago |
      Bitcoins resource usage was definitely a key point in the anti-crypto-hype arguments, can see from the Wiki lots of the references are from 2021:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_bitcoi...

      Also were not building out compute in any meaningful way, theres only actually been a couple of fundamental advancements to how we understand NN on a fundamental level, whats really changed is theres now a few companies with enough resources to throw an ungodly amount of compute power at a clearly already plateauing line of tech. To the detriment to every other opportunity.

      • Yemoshino 2 hours ago |
        Its not plateuing at all. And the next things are already in the working like world models.

        All this compute can also be used for other neural networks like finding new materials or drugs etc.

        But what i meant was, that the outcry against AI is so much louder than bitcoin. The argument was brought up for sure but it was ignored plenty. No one forbid a company to restart a gas power plant in NYC to JUST burn it for bitcoin.

  • ChrisArchitect 18 hours ago |
  • dwaltrip 16 hours ago |
    "Live AI Vote! Are you YES or NO?"

    Give me a frickin break. Absolute trash.

    Edit: I was pleasantly surprised to see that they don't add any tracking cookies from what I can tell, regardless of how you "vote". Still feels rather tasteless.