Share your feedback on the AI services experiment in Nightly

[asafko]

Hi folks, 

In the next few days, we will start the Nightly experiment which provides easy access to AI services from the sidebar. This functionality is entirely optional, and it’s there to see if it’s a helpful addition to Firefox. It is not built into any core functionality and needs to be turned on by you to see it. 

If you want to try the experiment, activate it via Nightly Settings > Firefox Labs (please see full instructions here). 

We’d love to hear your feedback once you try out the feature, and we’re open to all your ideas and thoughts, whether it’s small tweaks to the current experience or big, creative suggestions that could boost your productivity and make accessing your favorite tools and services in Firefox even easier.

Thanks so much for helping us improve Firefox!

[alisonborealis]

All of my preceding post, of course, fails to include the dire environmental impacts of AI. As far as easily-accessible information indicates, every AI out there consumes enormously disporoprtionate resources for the value of the (often incorrect and plagiarized) outputs. AIs contribute to electricity and water consumption to an extent that is shockingly detrimental to the environment and is exacerbating climate change (as none of these emissions of fossil fuel exhaust and water vapour - both GHGs - were ever calculated for or anticipated in existing climate models).

If Mozilla cares, which I'd been led to think it does, Mozilla will not implement AI on its products.

[EcoHound]

No.

Do not.

It's a terrible idea because it is nothing but an extremely resource heavy plagiarism machine that's not even good at plagiarism because of all the wrong answers it gives and has already made finding accurate information online far more difficult ("How many 'r's in Strawberry" anyone?)

[anonymous__user]

There are two (2) "r"s in "strawberry" 🙃

[anonymous__user]

Mozilla's chronic inability to focus on actual pressing issues, feature requests, bug fixes, performance improvements etc. while instead misdirecting resources to bullsh1t projects like this is why Firefox is going downhill.

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we’re open to all your ideas and thoughts

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LMA-fvckin-O, you are not. If you actually were, we wouldn't be here in the first place.
I'm under no delusion that anything that anyone says in this thread will do anything; it's just a PR move for Mozilla to proclaim "we listen to our community," and it's apparent that this "AI" bullsh1t is going to be permanently implemented into future releases regardless of how many people object.
There is nothing that anyone can say here that will get Mozilla to stop with this "AI" bullsh1t while funneling all their money to the executives who don't do jack sh1t but lead it further into collapse while taking massive paychecks. I still think it is worth it for everyone taking the time here to hurl some sh1t at Mozilla for their complete dysfunction - it truly deserves it.

Firefox is falling to the very ensh1ttification affecting other browser(s) and products that users were using it to avoid.
I can only hope now that the Ladybird browser project takes off, and that we will have a more independent, user-respecting browser experience not ran by a totally dysfunctional corporation that egregiously mishandles its already-limited resources by creating "AI" nonsense that no one wanted.

[yayroos]

Servo browser project also looking fairly promising, if we're looking for new players to save us this nonsense

[nope1]

what reason could mozilla possibly have to believe anyone who's installing firefox in the year 2024 is even remotely interested in AI. **bleep**ing embarrassing.

[nope1]

speaking of embarrassing, i feel it necessary to point out that the "bleep" was added by the site. understandable to not want profanity in a technical discussion but i would've much preferred a warning to having my comment rendered in the voice of a 5-year-old

[gay_apostasy]

you act as if ai was a service when it is everything but. are you going to add cryptomining to the browsers next? what a joke. be ashamed of even considering to add this. if you want to improve Firefox, get rid of the advertisements and the "anonymous" *wink wink* tracking.

[PseudoNym2112]

Get rid of the advertisements? But that would put the librewolf team out of work!

[JoakimH]

Please make this an optional extension. Let your users show you how much they value the feature by opting in to it manually.

For myself I'd like to see some leadership in privacy from Mozilla. This is the opposite as it endorses the continuous collection of data from web users even if Mozilla isn't directly doing it.

[PseudoNym2112]

Mozilla will NOT lead in privacy. Thank God there are responsible adults over on the librewolf team

[zleap]

I agree with the comments above in  that I don't want Ai integration,   not sure why it is being shoved down our throats,   I wil be looking at alternative browsers.

[yayroos]

for what it's worth, there's a librewolf (firefox fork) discussion going on at the moment where they appear to have agreed to strip out the AI sidebar and related settings. So that's a fairly low friction switch.

[Sam999]

Stop it with this AI nonsense. No customer wants this. The only ones wanting this are the tech bros pushing AI for everything so they can bill you. Stop it!

[Sam999]

And yes, I am disabling updates for Firefox now so I don't get hit with this crap.

[TamazonX]

No. Absolutely not. I want a browser that is a BROWSER. Not a ChatGPT client. Not a Google Gemini client. A web browser. I switched from Chrome to Firefox to get away from Google's constant AI push. Don't repeat the mistakes here.

[AntBand]

EXACTLY

[Aleph]

PLEASE don't. This spits in the face of every user of firefox. Firefox is supposed to be the safe privacy browser. All of these systems are built on theft of the entire internet, and the  theft of info & speech pattern from everyone that uses them. 

[jwallhead]

^^^^ exactly. as soon as a service starts investing in AI, they start using their own users' data to train it

[jwallhead]

I'm at a point that I lose respect for every engine and service that adds a new gen/AI feature. I also would like to know, with full transparency, the amount of energy consumption (and therefore the environmental cost) associated with Firefox's AI services. I love firefox over chrome, but I'm willing to drop it in favour of yet another service over this to be honest.

[mephistos]

Me too! Every company that decides to add "AI Features" ends up becoming a disaster zone of incorrect information, badly handled customer service, and blatant copyright violations and data stealing. I'm so over having this **bleep**ty robot nonsense forced on me!

[ada1]

Absolutely no A.I. It's already made google close to useless, and it's not even good at giving summaries. It frequently gives wrong information to the point where foragers relying on it have died because A.I wrongly identified mushrooms.

[Beanface42]

Well, it's tragically comic. 

[draconicrose]

I do not want this, because of all the reasons already mentioned. I don't care that it's opt-in and optional. I am fundamentally against supporting the development of LLMs in any way, shape, or form. I am against Mozilla spending development resources on this fad.

I've already cancelled my monthly donation. If this "feature" reaches stable, I will be switching browsers.

[feoh]

As currently implemented I think it is opt-in as you have to pick an AI vendor in order for the chat tab to work, and at least right now, you have to enable that feature in Firefox Labs.

[andy33]

ew no! no ai

[andy33]

its bad enough that duckduckgo keeps turning its ai settings back on without my permission! dont hardbake ai into the browser! its not making money btw!

[nataku31]

Absolutely not. Escaping AI has become increasingly difficult. Do not make it even more difficult to do so.

In addition to the massive toll AI takes on the environment, it is well known as a massive source of misinformation that is powered exclusively by theft of intellectual and creative properties. It's is is both unethical and a blatant attack on those of us who have spent our lives honing crafts.

[Ceropegiosity]

"AI" foraging "books" have already killed people. The only ethical choice is to avoid it and tell the truth - it is not intelligence, it is only the same level of mimicry as a hoverfly pretending to be a wasp.

[sparksfires]

The only reason I use Firefox is for privacy and security - why on earth would I want it to implement the AI models that are actively scraping my posts and writings online? I'll switch browsers yet again if anyone has recommendations for ones that are actually free of AI integration.

[gir02]

seconding this. the way AI works now requires an inherent breach of privacy. please god don't add AI features to firefox

[NoxEther]

The feature is useless; for those who want to use AI, it doesn't save them that much time or effort. As for those who do not want AI in our browser, it feels like a betrayal.

Firefox has built its brand on being the privacy-focused, human-first browser. Implementing AI goes against that branding and will turn people away. I've been using Firefox for two whole decades, and I am completely ready to let go of the convenience, the add-ons, and all the bells and whistles, to adopt one of the clunkier FOSS alternatives.

I will say it once again. The issues people have with AI-- the environmental, ethical costs, on top of the absolute mediocrity of its output-- go against the core values of Firefox. By adopting AI, by maintaining this features after all the previous angry and upset replies to this thread, you are telling us: we are not what we told us you were; we would rather hop on the AI bubble than provide you with the service you've come here for.

I am not hoping much from this, given how previous replies has been answered; clearly you're asking on feedback for a feature you intend to implement no matter what. Well! That is despicable, and I hope whoever decided this gets to reflect, reconsider, and steer their life on a more honest path.

[211rB]

^^^^

this, this is the one. couldn't have put it better myself.

[friendlyfrank]

Please do not bring in AI to firefox. It's horribly wasteful to the environment, often inaccurate to outright false in the information it presents, and just not a useful tool for what I want. My heart sank in my chest when firefox pushed an AI 'check reviews' tool while I was shopping! AI is part of why I swapped TO firefox in the first place.

[friendlyfrank]

Also, I am myself heavily disabled. Mentally and physically. So please no "Well for disabled people" nonsense.

[jaylett]

Just another Firefox user here to say don't spend time on this in future. And I'll do so via the medium of the screenshot you posted:

1. If you want a summary of a wikipedia page, you can use the Simple English variant of Wikipedia. Which, lo! has an entry for red panda. And it's better than the summary HuFace made - in part because the article seems better than the Wikipedia en original, but also because the summary lacks obvious features of a summary, such as what the body length that the tail matches actually is, that it's endangered, or anything concrete about its evolution that might justify a "taxonomy and evolution" subheading rather than just "random other facts".

2. If you thought that summarize was a good feature, then why would you crowd so much of that output with AI crap around the edges? If I want a summary and you think I'll be happy with the quality of this output, why should I care that you generated it by doing some kind of prompt dance? Why would I want to upload a file as a next action? What would that even do? What are the six tools? If any of them is useful, why aren't they available as a toolbar of some form? I can't peer inside the mind of your product designer, but my assumption is because you decided to add a chatbot to Firefox, and that's what a chatbot looks like for some reason. Identify a user problem. Solve the user problem. Don't trip over the furniture.

3. What is that headline doing? "Red Panda - A Small Mammal with a Big Personality". The LLM has just made that up presumably because "a small X with a big personality" is a moderately common snowclone.

The screenshot doesn't sell this feature, it should bury it. It looks like a quick proof of concept that someone threw together because their boss had read that McKinsey thinks that Krug comes out of Sam Altman's nipples. Mozilla is supposed to be better than this.

[MelMellon]

Incredibly well done summary of all that's wrong with this

[miah_lekjrs094r]

I created an account just so I could reply to this issue.

I've used Firefox since it was Netscape. I remember when Mozilla was formed. I used Phoenix, I used all the variations. I've been here since the start.

The recent trends of Mozilla leadership have been nothing short of appalling.

We do not want AI in the browser. We do not want ads or suggestions in the browser. We want a browser to view the Internet. We want a browser that isn't tied to tracking our every movement on the Internet in order to sell us something. If I wanted to support the ad industry I'd run Chrome.

Mozilla Firefox is literally one of 3 choices. You have Chrome, which most people are using, and tracks their every movement for Google. Safari, which is only a option if you live in the Apple walled garden. Mozilla Firefox, which is the last choice, and has the fewest users on the Internet, and with this change soon to be fewer. My goal is to continue using Mozilla Firefox as I believe in the goals of the Mozilla organization, especially this one "The things we create prioritize people and their privacy over profits.". But lately it seems that just like Google with "Don't be Evil" these are just words used to bring in users and not the companies actual stance.

AI is trash. AI hurts everybody who creates. AI hurts the planet. You have a choice, join the slop factory, or build a better future for the web.

Further, actually live the words you were built on. Trust and Privacy need to be at the forefront of your activities. Quit following the tech trends! Build good software and believe in your mission.

[doodlemancy]

I agree with you completely and I swear I'm not trying to be a weird internet pedant, I just think it's very funny that Microsoft Edge (which of course has AI garbage in it now) is entirely omitted from this post as One Of The Browsers That Exists(TM). ROASTED. Cemented in its place as an eternal afterthought, as it deserves, lol

[ashteranic]

Generally, I find the idea that Mozilla is cramming LLMs into Firefox to be abhorrent.

Generative AI and LLMs are not a direction the industry at large, or Firefox specifically, should be taking, for a variety of reasons:

* Accuracy and utility: LLMs are rapidly being discovered as *not* providing any value, and often providing incorrect results. A recent study by the Australian government found that LLMs are poor at summarizing content, one of the alleged key features of LLMs: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/09/australian-government-trial-finds-ai-is-much-worse-than-humans-at.... 

* LLM training and operations is having a substantially negative environmental impact, causing many tech companies to completely overshoot their climate goals https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16863. Google’s emissions are up 48% in five years, while Microsoft’s are up 30% between 2020 and 2023.

* LLMs and various training-based AI in general frequently results in biased results, such as reinforcing racism. 

* LLMs are contributing to an increase in the spread of phishing and other types of attacks, and frequently has confidential information ingested into it by users who do so unknowingly.

* LLMs are largely built on the backs of underpaid labor of workers across the world, many of whom come away from the experience traumatized.

* LLMs are heavily dependent on completely flouting copyright law, and are frequently criticized for outright stealing content used for training.

It is my strongly held opinion that installing LLM-based "AI" into Firefox runs counter to the Mozilla Foundation's Manifesto. LLMs reinforce biases, and contributes to the dire climate emergency we're all living through right now. As a technology base, I believe it is antithetical to the Mozilla Foundation's stated goals, and if it isn't, the manifesto should be updated so that it becomes so.