@barubary @davidgerard @jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs You could always report the user as a persistent troll misrepresenting who they are.

@budududuroiu @mike @firefoxwebdevs It's not about being able to turn off the features. It's about having to download and store them and give implicit permission to have them on your computer in the first place.

It's like someone saying "Hey, I mailed you that stack of books you want, but people told us they wanted more pictures so we made illegal copies of artworks and bound them in. The art pages come with preset double-sided tape on them so it's easy for you to stick the art pages together and not see them if you don't want. No harm, no foul, right?"

The harm isn't in the viewing (or not viewing), it's in the implied consent to the unethical behavior that made the viewing possible, and in asking customers to fix it after the fact.

@jaffathecake @barubary just to clarify, with "user research" do you mean the polls on bsky/fedi/etc, or were there other surveys conducted in places?

(asking because I don't think I saw any such surveys anywhere, and I'm _moderately_ on top of seeing this stuff go around)

@froztbyte I don't believe they were social media surveys, as the goal was to get a representative sample among locations and types of user. But it isn't information I currently have, and maybe won't be able to share.

@robotistry @budududuroiu @mike fwiw https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/116006634077716055

@jaffathecake if it's not information you currently have, doesn't that leave the possibility that they might in fact reflect a negative or inconclusive outcome in polling?

I mean, I get that you don't have eyes on this yourself and that you can't speak to it, I'm not putting this on *you*. but do you see how it could be possible that, without these results being open, someone could be going full steam ahead _in spite_ of the findings?

@firefoxwebdevs @robotistry @budududuroiu TBF, client-side translation is pretty cool, and generally better than sending the text to Google or similar.

@firefoxwebdevs @alextecplayz For the time being, you can see those models in about:addons, under the “On-device AI” page, and there will be a “Firefox uses this to sugest tabs” description, like this.

@froztbyte I suppose that's literally true. But, I also think a mountain is made out of the molehill that is AI in Firefox. The vast majority of the dev time is on other things.

To be clear, I'm not someone who has personally found AI generally useful in browsers (aside from a couple of one-off automations), but my feelings aren't strong enough to deny those features to others.

@jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard forget AI, at this point Jake is putting me off Firefox

@sotolf @firefoxwebdevs the "don't care" market means people love AI, of course!

And if that forms part of Mozilla's measurements, they're absolute idiots.

Better option: release a "No AI" build - https://notnull.space/@paul/statuses/01KGHVQ05QJFHPMBDJT16KCESZ

@duke_of_germany @jonny @jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard since 20 years ago I've been switching my friends, family, and coworkers and classmates to firefox. Its depressing, but I no longer recommend firefox. Let's ditch the AI please.

@paul well, if we created binaries for all combinations of the current 5 features, that would be 32x-ing the number of binaries per build. And I think people would still be unhappy depending on which was seen as the default.

The AI Controls give an easy way to have that granular control, and you don't need to switch binary just to try a feature.

@sotolf
haaaa. well it is true.

@firefoxwebdevs

@jaffathecake @froztbyte
To be clear. Making commercial chatbots available as first class citizen of the browser knowing their baggage in terms of ecological and social destruction is OK with you ?
Making non-authored, non-reviewed translations/summaries available as a first-class citizen of the browser doesn't even light an ethical warning ?

These could be available to users *who want them* without being promoted on the level of a standard experience of the web browser, who's denied anything?

@ddelemeny @froztbyte I don't personally use the chatbot feature.

I do use translation, with full awareness that it's a machine translation, and I consider being able to read parts of the web that aren't in my native language a wonderful thing, and I'm glad it's done in a privacy-preserving way.

The models were downloaded when I asked for the translation to happen. They weren't there beforehand.

@jaffathecake @froztbyte you aren't reading a part of the web. The translation was never on the web. Nobody had the opportunity to make sure it's right and nobody ever will. Ethics go farther than privacy.

I don't care if you personally don't use the chatbot feature. The existence of it in the default build will actively normalize and promote it to a userbase larger than the population of Brazil. Is social irresponsibility part of the manifesto here ?

@jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard You're really not helping yourself or Mozilla with this stuff, Jake. We're never going to see you as someone's victim when you're so set on avoiding the *real* issue that literally everyone is calling out to you. You don't get a medal for seeking feedback if you then ignore that feedback and openly disdain the users who provided it. Bogus shit.

@duke_of_germany @jonny @jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard

It is impossible to read this post without thinking of this recent article about Wikipedia’s internal strife and how communities become ossified and refuse to adapt to new conditions and then promptly die.

The organization version of progress advancing one funeral at a time

Is Wikipedia's Volunteer Model Facing a Generational Crisis?

The clash over AI-generated summaries reveals Wikipedia's challenge in adapting to younger audiences' media habits.

IEEE Spectrum (spectrum.ieee.org)

@ddelemeny @froztbyte how do you feel about a11y tooling that analyses images to describe them? Therefore providing people with visibility into things they otherwise wouldn't have.

That also is generating content in a format that was never on the web. Nobody had the opportunity to make sure it's right and nobody ever will.