"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
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.
As much as I hate AI, I get that they include stuff like that to appease the mainstream users. I would just wish they asked me beforehand if I want these features. At least its pretty unintrusive unlike most other AI implementations right now. And they give an option to remove it, which is nice.
I agree. I was all about to go up in arms about it when I saw that menu but then I was immediately relieved when I saw they've put the "Remove AI Chatbot" option right below it. They know their userbase very well and know that even though some people desire AI features to play with, a lot of us find it immediately repugnant and a show stopper so I think it's an ok way to appease both, provided that the AI wasn't active in the background until we had a chance to notice this menu and disable it.
As long as they don't pull a Microsoft and increasingly try to force it down our throats when they realise that nobody wants it.
You are right. And all this Firefox bashing is helping the real bad actors.
Let's take a realistic look. I think, AI is here to stay. With a few years more AI can be an invaluable assistant of your life. I don't think the bubble will burst in a way that AI will cease to exist completely.
The important part is, that the AI has to run on your systems in your terms. Nothing you prompt should ever be transferred to anywhere. If that's the case you have control and that's okay.
At the moment Mozilla is one of the better actors. Let's not jump on the bandwagon bash everything just because they changed a sentence in the AGB, while at the same time Google is pushing manifest v3. Lets be really picky about which technology will give us or take our digital sovereignty
What mainstream users? Firefox is tiny in usage compared to Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc. And the people who do use FF use it because they have enough tech knowledge to understand why those other browsers are bad/consumer hostile.
If FF starts catering to the 'mainstream' by acting like those other browsers, they're going to end up shrinking their user base instead of growing it.
This doesn't appease mainstream users, though...
I hate to break it to you, but we live in a time where the average users uses ChatGPT or Gemini instead of Google or Wikipedia to get information. Most of my coworkers use AI at least to some degree, even the technically more advanced users.
As much as I hate this, we can‘t just ignore it as if this wouldn‘t be the case. We are already in the Dead-Internet-Times and it will only get worse unless the bubble bursts, but even then we won‘t be at a point that we were at before this all started.
I saw that. See where it says “Remove AI Chatbot”? I clicked on that. It’s gone now.
Opt-out culture is how you get Windows. This is not normal or okay. Firefox exists just as an upstream these days.
Windows is the "ask me later" culture
But why was it there in the first place? Who asked for it?
Lots of regular users use AI
Most 'regular' users aren't using Firefox. FF has something like 5% market share — it's basically just for people techie enough to understand why chromium-based browsers are bad. I'm willing to bet that there's a significant overlap between those users and users who understand why AI is bad.
Firefox can't survive with just those users. That's why there's features that regular users like and that power users can just disable.
Sadly, I've seen one too many people asking for it.
I'm not anti-ai at all but this sort of thing feels like a security vulnerability to me?
Any website with a malicious prompt injection on it could instruct the ai to scam the user.
Almost like xss but instead of needing malicious user-inputted js, malware targeting the ai can just be written in text so an attacker could put it in a comment or whatever.
LibreWolf
And if that feels too locked down, WaterFox.
I want to try mobile firefox / and waterfox. But im stuck with Duckduckgo, cause it have a good bookmark system with folders and i can save it to my sd-card, no need for sync or accounts.
I saw that. If you go into about:config and diisable literally everything that has 'ml' in the name you can turn this bs off. One day i'll switch browsers D= 
Also it's really funny to me that publicly all these companies are shouting "AI!" but the engineers seem to know it's really just machine learning.
edit There are also some *.ml strings you can just straight up delete.
Help, now can't marixst-leninist
And nothing of value was lost.
I did the same thing. I'm happier, but I'm thinking of trying LibreWolf now.
Its a couple of toggles my friend.
they should just make it an extension people can add on instead of baking this shit into the pie
seriously, containers are an extension but ai is mandatory? make it make sense
Make that shit opt in and don’t force install that crap onto my system.
So glad I switched to LibreWolf with how much Firefox is becoming another corporate platform.
It just sends the page to a site of your choosing. It's not really installing anything. Even the offline AI thing downloads the stuff afaik when you pick languages you want to use
At least it is less obvious than the way chrome is handling AI 'integrations'. Google is hamfisting AI to the point where chrome is basically a billboard.
"DOES BABY WANT GEMINI?"
"DOES BABY WANT AI MODE?"
"DOES BABY WANT AI SUMMARY FOR 2 MINUTE YOUTUBE VIDEO?"
"I see you clicked no. I'll remind baby a few days from now"
Stop using chrome
I never said I used chrome personally. My work environment demands it.
I'm in the same boat - my work uses chromebooks.
I got frustrated earlier this week, trying to remove AI suggestions from Google on my work account. It's set up in such a way that I can't opt out. Search for ways to remove AI from your results, and all the tutorials say to "Click the lab button" to disable AI.
I looked on my Google page - there is no "lab" button.
I looked up trouble-shooting for "no lab button," and attempted to follow a direct link to the controls it's supposed to provide.
Apparently, since my account is managed by a company, I don't have access to permissions... including the permission to remove AI results. Fuck.
Long story short, although I really wanted to throw my work laptop into a fire, I instead decided to change my default search engine to DuckDuckGo.
I can't escape the Google environment entirely, but at least I can still use a search engine that lets me opt out of automatically generating AI crap.
Ah, developer? Or they just force it in a work computer? Either way, feel your pain.
I'm fine with this. It's not only optional. Is where I'd never even ick it by accident
Yeah. This is literally how LLM models should be used. Non intrusive and just a helpful way to find shit quickly related to settings or such.
My AI hate is entirely based on its exploitation of labor. Using art or otherwise to create garbage that is not paying the people who's art or work was used to create it.
An open source project using a model trained to help users with Firefox settings. What labor is being exploited here? None from my understanding.
It's just a helpful tool. Please, please. Understanding WHY you hate AI. Don't be upset about the invention of the Loom. Be upset that the benefits of the invention are going to the rich capitalist. The invention of the Loom/AI should make your life and your labor easier. You should get the same benefits while doing less work. THAT is the problem. You should hate AI because you hate capitalist modes of production.
Edit: I'm making an assumption about this feature. I would assume it's a very efficient CPU capable model to help answer Firefox questions. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the only reasonable thing I could guess this feature would even be. Haven't looked into it though.
Don't forgot environmental hard
Assuming you meant harm. My assumption is that this is a locally CPU run model that is basically a glorified AOL chatbot. Again, I'm making some assumptions here.
But I really think the "AI" in this is just using a buzzword. When technically it is but it's likely not what we think like a heavy LLM like ChatGPT. I really doubt Firefox is sending prompts to GPU farms and it's likely just a simple model that runs on your local CPU. Likely optimized to answer browser related prompts or Firefox related prompts in general. I could be wrong. But I'd be surprised if it was at all outsourcing prompts to a GPU farm.
It's a good example (if my assumptions are correct and Firefox is not braindead plugging in ChatGPT into the browser) actually of how AI application specific models can be very efficient and helpful. All the money we push into the "god AI" is really what people think of with "fuck AI". China is working heavily in models like this.
For example. They just released a new application specific model that is extremely efficient at character recognition in images. Basically, if you took a picture of a page in a book it converts it to text that can be edited on a computer. It's a case of an AI model actually improving compute efficiency when compared to other previous "non-ai" methods of computer vision.
But I digress. I think most of "fuck AI" could be summarized as "fuck capitalism" though. American investors are chasing a "worker replacement" model that they are failing at obtaining.
I did mean harm yeah
Completely get your view there, like whenever I'm talking to people about tech (especially when I'm having other scientists explain their research) I always avoid using the word AI and when they use it I always tell them to clarify.
I have no idea what they are using for their own summarization features, but I know the chatbot tool is just a front-end to interface with other services, not its own LLM.
Also which model are you talking about for image to text, sounds like a potential improvement on earlier work I'd like to see
I do agree as well most "fuck AI" is fuck capitalism if only indirectly by some. Its why I care about the environmental harm a lot as it wouldn't exist if not for the capitalistic drive to build at all cost. LLMs aren't worth people's lives or dead ecosystems, they aren't even the tech that will achieve AGI as they don't do continuous learning (evident from the seed change between shit GPT3 to human like ChatGPT was an RL training protocol). Most modern technology has the curse of its owners which prevents it from being used ethically or for the common good.
This. It's not like it's running LLM queries behind your back. It's not even a popup. Just an option in the menu that will do nothing as long as you don't click on it.
There's an option in about:config to turn it off: browser.ml.enable
Its been there a while and I actually like this. You can set it up to connect to your own ML server, and it saves me a ton of time when I get assigned a support ticket with days of tier one back and forth I have to sift through.