@mike @firefoxwebdevs Preference falsification, it's seen as socially condemnable to be ok with AI, especially in the circles that Mozilla frequents, so I'm not surprised public comments trend negative. Given they've sent an anonymous survey out, I'm pretty sure the balance is split between the no-AI and AI everything camps.

I don't get the vitriol towards Mozilla, at least not for this change, they literally show you how to turn off their AI features

@firefoxwebdevs
It must be really uncomfortable for you and your team to see this outpouring of opposition to the direction you are being lead.

I hope you know its not personal. But you must understand that it is deadly serious.

Please, hear us as we all shout in unison: STOP WASTING MONEY AND ENERGY ON GRIFTS AND JUST MAKE THE BEST DAMN BROWSER YOU CAN MAKE.

@firefoxwebdevs If you physically and permanently remove all AI-related code from Firefox, I might start using it again. Not until.

@jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs i keep seeing this cop-out, but i have yet to see any polling from mozilla that says a majority of their users do want AI in their browser.

e.g. 14 days ago i see an informal poll in reddit with the same conclusion - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1qhfvkw/interested_in_your_views_on_ai_in_firefox/

the thread inviting people to comment on the AI window a few weeks ago was the same thing, overwhelmingly negative - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922

so if in community after community people are nearly unanimous about the pivot to AI, it seems like the burden is on firefox dev team to show that there is some silent majority that is loving it rather than insisting that every community is an echo chamber

@ArneBab @firefoxwebdevs
I have no idea. I hadn't seen this UI even internally until a few days ago.

@firefoxwebdevs please make separate version without any AI, without translate (made by monolinguals) and call it betterfox. It will have succes! Also less code - less bugs, less mistakes and less vulnerabilities.

Less work - more output!

@vex @ArneBab @firefoxwebdevs

Google is not pushing Mozilla to use AI features. To the extent people get their answers from AI rather than doing a Google search that is _costing_ us money.

@firefoxwebdevs it should be disabled by default. Also telemetry and ads tracking kill switch when?

@firefoxwebdevs@mastodon.social Maybe it would've been better to just not call the on device features AI features at all. People would be more willing to try them if they don't associate them with massive GPU farms.

@ArneBab @vex @firefoxwebdevs @dveditz

Dont want "AI" in my Browser is the first and only thing there is to say about this.

We all know the implications of this technology anyway, right?

@alvan @firefoxwebdevs They run locally, aside from the summarize feature, the sidebar and the search engine.

@firefoxwebdevs @raymaccarthy @plwt To be fair, the term AI has been so overloaded that it lost a lot of nuance. What most people hate with a passion are llms trained on data without permission, using up an insane amount of resources, while eroding people’s cognitive abilities by suggesting they eat rocks. And Mozilla saw this technology, and thought “let’s go all in on that”.

@nuintari @firefoxwebdevs Now that‘s the big question: are the very outspoken crowd that hates AI features a majority of Firefox users or are they just very outspoken while those like such features but just don‘t care enough about them to speak up (against the outspoken crowd which can be stressful) here. I don‘t know.

@mike @alahmnat @firefoxwebdevs And then I spent a few hours not sleeping but thinking about your comment (never read mastodon when going to bed!)

Because this is not my impression. And I‘m wondering if the clever ranking mechanism of Kagi (don‘t recall the details but they are much better at filtering out all kinds of slop - AI and human) is why I don‘t see a worse internet today than years ago. Compared to clickbait titles, animated ad horror, AI‘s impact on my browsing is very minor.

@firefoxwebdevs Nice, happy that that’s finally in there, although the flow is a bit obnoxious, I’ve seen less aggressive warnings on actions that permanently delete data, so putting it on a switch that can easily be turned back on still makes it feel that you want people to use it way too much.

Imagine getting a similar warning when turning off any other feature…

@funbaker As long as the training source is used with informed consent (without coercion), I don’t mind image classification or automatic transcription.

ALT Text for images can be pretty important for blind people and replaces proprietary systems that do the same, but remotely.

For translation I’m unsure: biases AI copy from the target language are risky:
https://www.draketo.de/software/ai-translation-evaluated#completely-changed

Using AI for tab-group suggestions feels like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
@vex @firefoxwebdevs @dveditz

@firefoxwebdevs too little, too late.

@fabio @wojtek it does include translation, which people consider to be AI https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115849251057488746. It even sends the text off-device to be translated, whereas Firefox does it on-device for privacy.

@ainmosni @firefoxwebdevs it does delete models. They can be re-downloaded, of course, but that might be significant disruption for some users

@KitsuneVixi @firefoxwebdevs we didn't call translation AI but people still consider it AI https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115849251057488746