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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#141

Post by infermore »

cwillu wrote: post #129
thih9 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...) You can disable AI in Google products. E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox. Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322

And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?

guess we'll see in a month

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#142

Post by mrits »

rs186 wrote: post #86

Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of t…

After using Chrome for a decade I switched to firefox a few years ago when there was a headline about Google blocking ad blocker. I'm not sure whatever happened to that but I wanted no part in a company even considering it

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#143

Post by bildung »

boplicity wrote: post #116
jve wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone want AI in anything? I want in Text to speech (TTS) engines, transliteration/translation and... routing tickets to correct teams/persons would also be awesome :) (Classification where mistakes can easily be corrected) Anyways, we used TTS engine before openai - it was AI based. It HAD to be AI based as even for a niche language some people couldn't tell it was a computer. Well from some phrases you can…

Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.

Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still.

On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#144

Post by benrutter »

transcriptase wrote: post #10

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#145

Post by mkayokay »

everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

Looks like the comments on Mozilla Connect are not that positive either:

Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...>

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#146

Post by riskable »

altcognito wrote: post #75

People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly. I also don't need / don't want it's manipulative presence around. Not to be paranoid, but it's not just about browsers, that's just the most convenient place we've gotten started with this sort of mass surveillance (and control) architecture.

> People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.

Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I know, there's only two companies doing what you describe: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and evil) by a huge amount—because it's at the OS level.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#147

Post by erikerikson »

Meanwhile a badly behaving page doesn't just maim the tab content area but freezes the whole browser. I've been using Firefox because my Chrome install got borked so I've used that to try giving FF a real try. I feel like I regularly have to get it out of my way. Maybe fix the browser first.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#148

Post by flatline »

A more cynical take/question: is Mozilla just pursuing these initiatives because their corporate sponsors need to push AI everywhere they can to justify their burn, in the hopes that a profitable use case eventually arises with a sufficient user base accustomed to the technology to pay for it?
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