AI needs to go

[Myoukitsune]

Adding AI is one mistake. Automatically installing it AND opting me in is the second. Adding it to my right click and - I assume - having the chatbot watch everything I do and say is the third.

I've long been a fan of firefox because it was THE secure, more CPU-light, and "more free" browser compared to Google of Microsoft. Imagine my surprise today when I right click a page and see some horrible option to "ask an AI chatbot" about a youtube page. Imagine my frustration and anger as I have to dig through three different areas of the settings to find and remove the traces of this supposed on-device AI that's eating CPU and which I couldn't be sure isn't just watching everything I do and feeding it back to the mothership to train the models.

I'll only give props for calling it what it is - a chat bot - but there is literally 0 use case for wanting to right click a page and have an AI try and fail to read it for me and give me actually useful and relevant information. There is no world in which "AI" is ready to give anything accurate. Disclaimers about inaccuracies and articles about AI doing things like promoting suicide and affirming suicidal ideation pop up daily because - it turns out - the less power used and the more time spent chatting the more off-the-rails the "AI" goes.

Horrible, garbage feature that inspired me to come here and complain on a feature page I've never used. It needs to go or it'll join the garbage pile as some other new browser rises from the ashes as Firefox goes the way of NetScape.

[CQA]

If AI was really all that, the billionaires wouldn't be desperately trying to sell it to us. They'd be hoarding it jealously. It's a bubble that's currently in the process of bursting and I hope Firefox reverses course and drops it early.

[palace261]

May I suggest LibreWolf for a AI free and lightweight alternative. 

[Myoukitsune]

You may and I might just use that. The benefit to open source.

[Inuya5ha]

In Firefox for Windows, the AI assistant is (luckily) nowhere to be found yet. However, it’s probably only a matter of time before they add a prominent, non-removable AI button floating somewhere—most likely in the most annoying possible location, just like Edge does.

On Android, I use Opera—partly for historical reasons, and partly because it has had plenty of time to mature over countless years of development, dating all the way back to the old J2ME versions.

[Redglyph]

I agree. Such an option to have an AI chat has no place in Firefox.

Those LLM-based chat bots might be useful in some limited circumstances, like asking general questions of linguistics when users are aware of the risks, but they generally induce people in error by giving inaccurate information more often than not.

Encouraging their use from a simple right-click is irresponsible at best. Don't feed the hype.