Comment by al_borland
1 day ago
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard. One was just messaging me this morning about alternatives to Google search and maps. He ended up downloading DuckDuckGo.
If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
All conventions and user centricity go out the window with AI feature launches lately. If you look at examples from the last week it’s stuff like posthogs opt-out training, Copilot training, or Google’s antigravity chat-app switch.
I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
My health insurance company decided calling support meant I consented to them saving my voice for model training. They said you can opt-out online, but that option didn’t exist in app or on their website. It was only after calling back and threatening to sue that they added an option to opt-out.
This is the daily experience now. Seemingly every company is opting you into selling your data, breaking your workflows, disabling features you use, and force installing AI integrations you have to fight to remove. And several companies are perfectly fine to reenable or reinstall them after removal.
It should be no surprise to anyone people are mad.
What real value AI does have has been poisoned by premature rollouts (training users it’s crap) and forcing it on people too aggressively.
One of the recent rollouts that really grind my gears was Spotify rolling out LLM explanations of songs. Which is the most useful wasteful piece of sh*t ever. Why would I want to get a theory of what is 174bpm and other random crap.
It is insane, and I hate modernity and every single modern product that just shoves random LLM crap at you and pretend they are not AI-enabled.
Spotify is a toxic shit company overall that is a general detriment to all musicians everywhere.
If you care about music just a little bit you should stop using it today and directly buy music from the artists you care about.
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One fascinating thing about LLMs is the degree of evangelism it inspires in some. You can explain some of that with paid micro influencers, people invested in the success of AI, consultants looking for workshop opportunities and all that, but I know enough people with no skin in the game at all, that turned into very vocal advocates.
I think to some degree, that effect is also at play here. CEOs, product managers etc are simply amazed, and want to spread the good news. I doubt they can even _comprehend_ that others might not be as excited as them.
One character I find interesting is Ezra Klein from the New York Times who desperately wants to see something positive come out of markets and industry and has an enthusiasm for AI which is not shared by his audience. He struggles to understand that skepticism and I think that's bad for his project.
At least he's not one of the many mooks who are doing ChatGPT-assisted (Grok-assisted?) blogging and boasting about it, even when it goes wrong, like Casey Handmer.
You also have to consider a ( I would argue large ) percentage of those evangelists are simply lying for financial gain. They see profit, or at least reduced costs, and quite simply don't give a shit about customer experience or anything like that.
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I'm sure there is an effect when people talk on socials (linkedin, company intra etc) that they are marketing themselves. This is why I won't take any claims on socials that seriously.
I'll believe it when I see it.
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After-the-fact opt-outs are something I never trust. Most data selling is opt-in and requires the user to opt-out. It seems to me that when I submit the form, the data would be instantly sold and by the time I get to the opt-out form it’s too late.
If this isn’t how it works, I’d be interested to know. The whole idea of these opt-outs seem like smoke and mirrors to act good while still gaining the advantage from the dark pattern. The only way to truly opt-out is to not register or use a service at all. There really needs to be legislation around this.
That's how it worked the last time I bought a car. I submitted the opt-outs with the purchase paperwork, the ~sales~ data sharing agreements with 10k of the dealership's closest, paid friends were processed first, and I had no end of bullshit from a hundred companies I'd never interacted with previously.
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The GDPR specifies that opt-outs are also retroactive, but of course we know that all corporations happily follow the law.
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>The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
>I’ve had the worst customer experiences of my life in the last few months.
I attribute that to the massive amount of tax breaks and money that has been funneled to them by various governments. The government is the customer that they are appeasing right now. As soon as the spigot is turned off, they will be more inclined to appease us.
I do not know the consumer or b2b AI market well right now. I do know that billions of dollars are at stake from government sources. A smart company would focus on that.
I'm not aware of any government handouts for tech companies adding AI to their products, can you give an example, please?
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I'm someone who makes extensive used of LLMs and agents for daily research, and I 100% of the time ignore the AI summary that google gives at the top of the page. If I am performing a web search, I've already decided that I'm explicitly NOT looking for an LLM summary.
I think Google's "AI Mode" does better at integrating search results and answering questions. It can find articles and scientific papers that match my memory in most situations and does a lot better at Arknights question answering than Microsoft Copilot (reskinned ChatGPT) does.
> posthogs opt-out training,
It should seriously be 100% illegal to force someone's content into AI training without their explicit consent, and no not opting out should not be an escape hatch.
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Search is not the golden goose. Ads are. If search was the golden goose, they wouldn't be trying so hard to replace it with AI.
Just because Google used to do search as their main point of business does not mean that holds true today. Holding on to the false premise will only add to your confusion about their decisions.
Ads in Search make up a significant percentage of their revenue. It is also the gateway that gets people into the Google ecosystem.
Ads make the money, but Search is still the consumer facing product that brings people to Google and keeps them there. It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
I’m always surprised by how much people are still searching for stuff as we’ve moved from the open web to various platforms (Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, etc), but every time I see Google’s revenue breakdown I’m shocked by just how important Search still is to their business.
This is from 2024, but shows Search accounting for nearly 57% of revenue. Yes, this is made possible by the AdWords business, but without Search, that 57% goes away, unless that traffic goes to a 3rd party that is also using AdWords and Google were to make the same from 3rd party ads as 1st party. I find that doubtful.
https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/google-revenue-break...
And let's not forget, these are the same people that when searching for "eBay" will put an ad at the top of the results, linking to eBay, and then place eBay as the top search result.
I've found it hilarious that every single search engine does the same thing. You can do it even in Apple's App Store too. (Not seeing the scam I'm talking about? Search a few more times, it'll hit) How does anyone see this as anything but a scam? User clicks the ad? Get paid. User clicks the search result? No pay. Either way, the user gets the same experience. But why the fuck should any company pay for an ad when the user explicitly searched for their product? It's metric hacking. I mean what's their next move? Down rank the explicit result? When making more money requires degrading the product you know we've fucked up
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> It’s so ubiquitous people don’t even think about it or notice it anymore.
Which is kind of the scary hazard for Google. They made people notice search by their announcements. They drew attention to the thing people took for granted as just how things work. People suddenly have a reason to look critically at it. Google has to hope to god the attention they receive back is actually positive.
> ads in search
Right, but you know what's even more effective than ads in search? Biased (towards paying customers) information in LLM output.
The main reason Google loved search was because it was the primary way they got your personal info. Now Chrome gives Googles your entire browsing history, Gmail lets them read your email, youtube tells them what you're interested in, android gives google your entire life offline and suddenly the only thing google search is good for is as just one more website pushing google ads.
AI is going to be great at pushing ads. Plus AI trains you to give google even more control. Instead of just presenting you with a list of websites offering different perspectives and opinions on something, Google can just tell you what they want you to know/think (or not tell you anything they'd rather you not know/think about). The more you get used to treating google like an oracle instead of a librarian the easier it will be to manipulate you.
May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching.
I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.
They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
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This. Google wants to sell advertising. If they can embed advertising into AI and make more money, they will.
You ask AI for a product recommendation. It says "Buy X from Acme". Is that paid product placement? Who knows?
There's a no ads in the Ai result though. And even if they add there isn't space for like 4 or 5 ad results like some searches can return. Some Google searches I have to scroll a whole screen away before I see a real result.
This is just wrong. They are working AI into search so that AI does not cannablize search. Search goes hand-in-hand with ads.
Been using Google since they exists. I stopped without any issue and even thinking too much about it 2 years ago.
This include work.
I use DDG, kagy and the LLM du jour .
Again, no friction. No plan. No transition période. I just changed the default search engine on a whim.
While there is a meaningful subset of the population that will do this, I wonder if the vast majority of people, even if they share the same negative sentiment towards AI and in particular how Google is pushing it in their products, will find the friction in changing up their workflows and routines to be too much to actually change things up.
While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs.
Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off).
And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).
> weren't quite as good
A lot of people keep saying this, and yet I never saw a reasonable example. Whenever DDG fails for me, the Google's results are even worse.
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they hate AI being pushed so hard.
My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology and never talked about it, are suddenly following tech news closely all because they have fear of missing out on AI :(
One of my friend ended up spending too much time on Candy AI or some sort of AI companion thingy :/
> because they have fear of missing out on AI
That's been my experience too, both with friends and coworkers.
It would seem that the negative sentiment around AI is largely an internet phenomenon. I've yet to run into a hardcore "AI skeptic" irl. People seem either neutral, or enthusiastic about it.
I've yet to meet anyone outside that likes AI except for manager or when people are pretending for their bosses at work. It became a survival tactic.
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Talk to career artists in real life (like animators); a majority of them have already lost their jobs due to AI layoffs.
Meanwhile I've never run into anyone who actually likes AI in any form (except for my boss). Most people who dislike it aren't bringing it up at random. I'm sure it has to do with the circles you interact with and their demographics.
I've had conversations in recent months with several friends who are non-tech, "granola" type folks. They pretty universally expressed dislike for and concern about AI, but then when the conversation turned to whether they used it for anything, the all admitted that they do appreciate being able to use it for some tasks. I think it's complicated for a lot of people (myself included).
A recent NBC News poll gave "AI" a -20% net approval rating. If you're in the U.S., the people you run into IRL are kinda weird.
(I didn't quickly find polls for the rest of the world)
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As a hardcore AI skeptic, no one has run into me IRL either, because I pretend at work to be neutral, except to the one other skeptic who also pretends to be neutral.
Seems the main claims against it center around:
1. Labor replacement
2. AI is actually bad in-and-of-itself. Doesn't work, not useulf etc.
3. Energy concerns
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This goes for most tech topics. Not long ago tech sites had users who were aware that their preferences as a tech person were different than the average person.
Then it became so common to be a techy person and surround yourself with other techy people that it was easy to fall into a bubble and not realize it. When all of your news websites, coworkers, social media feeds, and friends in the group chat all think the same thing it feels like everyone in the world agrees with you.
You see it whenever social media topics come up. On Hacker News there’s never ending confusion about how Facebook continues to exist because the common refrain is “nobody uses Facebook any more”. Leave the tech bubble, though, and Facebook has a massive number of active users and activity. Whenever I mention this it gets doubted, denied, or even dismissed as lies from Meta trying to inflate their stock price. The dismissals always come from people who proudly deleted their Facebook account ten years ago and therefore have no idea what happens on Facebook, of course.
One of my favorite comment sections this year was when a lot of people were recounting how their aunt or cousin or grandma used Facebook and actually enjoyed it, which attracted comments saying they must be a rare outlier. It just goes too much against the bubble consensus that everyone hates Facebook and has a bad time when they use it.
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I know plenty in real life. Way way way more than online.
I'm in my 50s and all my friends and family hate AI. My parents in their 70s can't really comprehend it. They got used to search and want nothing to do with AI. Some company is trying to build an AI data center where they live, and they're livid about it.
Personally, I like it sometimes, but I'm a techie and understand the limitations, and I dislike not being given options to use or not use it.
> The AI product rollouts in the last two years have been some of the most aggressive and user hostile product rollouts in my entire life.
I’m getting extremely annoyed by the Base44 ads I see on YouTube every other video.
First I pressed skip all the time, but the ads keep popping up. So now, every time I see it, I click on the ad and then immediately close the site. At least I can make their aggressive ad strategy a bit more expensive.
Youtube revanced on your phone + ublock on firefox and you'll never see youtube ads again. There's also a replacement app for android TV that I forgot the name of that works well. Do not use chrome, google nerfed its ad-blocking capabilities a while ago
I can't fathom why anyone would still willingly watch ads when there are so many ways to block them online.
Its probably why you keep seeing them a click is marked as interest and clicking away doesnt cost anything they refund it.
No, for a long time I never clicked. But since I keep seeing the freaking ads, I decided to click on them, because from what I understand they have to pay money for each ad click.
> downloading DuckDuckGo.
What for? Just use the website via your favourite browser.
That’s what I told him… just set Safari to use it in Settings, but it seemed like he had already done it and was now invested in using a whole new app just to switch search engines. This is a symptom of the app-based model people now think in.
And that mindset makes this move even more risky. If people move away from Chrome to DDG, Brave, or Kagi Orion browsers which block tracking by default, then that will harm their ad income even more.
> My friends who previously had no interest in technology
Their friend are probably the kind of people conflating Chrome/Google with "The Internet"
And I think on Android its even less clear the distinction between the browser app and "Google"
What for? Just tap the icon to open the app.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
we have moments like this every few years (almost as frequent as crypto waves in recent memory), but they keep chugging along.
couple years back it was all about saying the GPTs have replaced search for people and how google is dead. now when they implement the same, it drives people away.
i can imagine how it can be difficult to be in their shoes, when any change is met with negativity. no surprise that the core interface has...had not changed all this time.
context: left to ddg almost a decade ago in a similar exodus wave.
All that being said the product is genuinely worse now.
The other day I googled "I'll be resolving" in quotation marks as I usually do when I'm unsure if it's idiomatic (or grammatically correct for that matter) English.
AI mode replied with: "I'm on it. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll jump right in with the exact steps, scripts, or details you need to tackle it! What exactly are you looking to resolve?"
Just give me the damn phrase used in a sentence along with the number of results so that I can assess how common this expression is.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Too late, people have started moving. They have to act fast to stop the migration from growing.
I'm curious — how do non-techies know? During stand-up the other day I was making small talk like "hey did you guys know that Google search is dead" and everyone was like "it is?" and I had to link to the Google IO to prove it because indeed, doing a Google search worked the same way it always had.
So I'm wondering how other folks are finding this out.
I think this is very true. They probably got scared of the almost 1b weekly active users of ChatGPT, and how people would rather ask ChatGPT than use Google. It will be a balance but this is a great opportunity for smaller search engines to make a real comeback.
For what it’s worth, you don’t need to even download DDG. I just set it as my homepage on my iOS safari.
It can be set as the default search engine in Safari, one of the few options Apple gives for search engines. No need to change your home page. I told my friend this as well, but I think that idea was slightly beyond his current mental model of how things work on the phone.
I’ve tried using the homepage method before with Kagi, as the extension to set it as the default search is a pretty ugly hack. I found it created too much friction, as I’m often searching from an existing page.
Kagi phone app is pretty nice. I do all my searching in Kagi, the clicked results launch my default browser and the search results stay stable where they are.
Customize Search Engine (https://cizzuk.net/projects/cse/) allows you to make whatever search engine actually work in the address bar.
You have to set it to lite.duckduckgo.com (or noai.duckduckgo.com) or you still get AI crap from DDG too.
Downloading a search engine website?
DuckDuckGo makes a webkit wrapper with their branding. It does actually have some good features built in, but I don't recommend it over Brave or Mullvad Browser.
Google has been ever-worsening trash for years.
Their "AI" bullshit did in fact push me to finally make DuckDuckGo my default page. Happy to hear others are switching too.
> AI being pushed so hard.
What I see is people using AI of their own free will, because it's incredibly useful.
It's true that inside tech companies, AI is being pushed into products, but outside of those companies, normal people are rapidly adopting AI for all sorts of daily uses.
"I don't know what this symbol on my dishwasher means." -> Ask AI.
"Why is my bread not rising properly?" -> Ask AI.
These are the types of things that previously would have taken a lot longer to figure out, but that you can get an immediate answer to with AI. That's the fundamental reason why it's taking off. Not because it's being pushed.
You can talk all you want about generalization and reasoning ability and AGI, but the fact is that it's also useful simply as a really user friendly database.
Even if it's only able to report facts from its dataset or perform simple synthesis of search results.
That it can actually reason to a certain extent is bonus points.
> If Google isn’t carefully they’re going to push people away from their golden goose.
Won’t be surprised if Google thinks their Golden Goose is terminally ill and AI is the replacement.
Google is really an information provider powered by ads. That’s what people use their search for - to get information.
Google’s search basically has the internet as its backend - information-wise. I think it’s inevitable that AI slop (output from low quality GenAI) will render it useless eventually.
So Google’s solution is to build their own AI with information curated by them to try to stay the front page of the internet.
DDG has the same AI overview at the top of their search results that Google does. What's the goal of switching?
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
the default is still the AI'ed version though...
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