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!

[cgranade]

I'll say here what I said on the Bugzilla feature request to have a version of Firefox without this malware pre-installed. Namely, as a user of Firefox I expect the browser to behave more or less in my best interests, at most times, and in most ways.

By including a feature that directly works against my interests as a writer (due to the massive devaluation of creative labor under AI auspices), as someone who is harmed by climate change (due to the runaway energy costs of LLM evaluation), as someone who has a vested stake in truth (LLM-based AIs cannot, even in principle, evaluate truth claims and indeed promulgate disinformation at an alarming scale), and as someone harmed by tech centralization (due to the guarding of LLMs behind corporate paywalls), Firefox has now rather flagrantly countered that expectation.

While I do not necessarily believe that Firefox will or even should change that situation, it does mean that in the least, Firefox is not a safe browser in its present form, such that I can no longer recommend it to my peers on that basis.

Since I posted my original comment, several posts by Mozilla employees have indicated that a local-only and ethically trained LLM may be useful instead, for instance by summarizing page content. This runs directly counter to how LLMs work, to the science that helps us understand what LLMs are and can do, and also to the whole human interest behind the work to put things out into the world for people to read. Firefox currently ships Reader Mode, which is an amazing tool to help users read and enjoy the writing out there on the web in an inclusive and accessible way; it's a shame that Firefox seems to now be mostly interested in the opposite.

[Marshyedblob]

Absolutely not

[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.

[Cantos]

the thing is, it will not bring more users and will alienate the ones you already have, people choose firefox because it's not tied to the will of those kinds of big corporations.

cool that some of the models are open source, that doesn't mean much about them being ethical

[tante]

Make it a plugin if you need to jump on the hype.

Just because Arc Browser and Edge include those things - largely in ways that harm the open web - Firefox should not add this. It's against the mission of protecting the free and open web, against people getting credible information from the web and incentivises the usage of massively wasteful technologies.

Something like this should never be a core feature.

[Faskil]

NO.

[parlei]

No!

Please, "AI" is just automated bull**bleep** and plagiarism, with a side order of privacy issues. 

No,. please no.

[Same_as_yester]

No

[opfragile]

rancid. can't believe you people are actually thinking of adding this garbage.

[janro]

It would be great if Firefox could focus on other features instead.

[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.

[Novaa]

No. 
Nobody wants generative ai. 

[zeborah]

No. No, for the love of everything you hold dear, no.

There are two things I want in life:

1. A web browser I can trust.
2. For a single company to say "You know what? We don't actually need to jump on this BS LLM bandwagon, our product works perfectly well without it."

Wouldn't it be fantastic if those two things could coincide?

LLMs are built by breaching copyright, breaching privacy, and destroying the environment. They're also inherently unreliable, with no hope of ever improving because the method used to create them was never designed to generate truth, only to generate verbiage that sounds pretty truthy. (I briefly thought RAG might help but turns out nah, not really.) They're great at amplifying prejudice and bigotry though so y'know, that's an achievement I guess?

However, since I've never yet met a company who said "Hey we've developed a cool AI thing and we want your feedback" who ever actually listened when the feedback was "No, please just no", how about this:

Going forward, maintain two versions of Firefox. One with all the stupid bells and whistles for people who enjoy bandwagons; and a separate one that just... lets people browse the web like our forebears intended.

[two]

bad. bad firefox, your better than this. no ai

[skibidi]

THE ENTIRE REASON I'M USING FIREFOX IS BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANY AI

GET AI OUT OF HERE !!!

[Aiala]

**bleep**ing no.

Purge that away of the browser or I'll quit to never look back.

[noogaibb]

Hard no, also whoever thought adding chatbot to anything is a good idea should be launched to the moon and beyond.
Seriously, did your entire company having rock and glue pizza for meals every day?

[opfragile]

you usually see this kind of thing after being sponsored by an AI software developer, so who's sponsoring y'all? Or are you just ruining your reputation for free?

[NineByNine]

Not least of all because this "AI" rubbish (which is all just markov chain bots with a new lick of paint and more marketing spent on it, rather than anything actually APPROACHING Artificial Intelligence) is a scam and useless, I would also appreciate it NOT being in any products I use, ESPECIALLY not the only browser not just Chrome wearing a mask yet again, because a) it is humongously wasteful to the environment given the amount of heat it generates and energy it uses, b) it is humongously wasteful from a FINANCIAL perspective (which is something corporations might actually understand and take note of, since they clearly don't give a flying foxtrotuniformcharliekilo what their customers actually want or need) and c) it is invariably wrong because it has no concept or knowledge or EVEN IDEA of context, truth, or even validity, because again, it's not actually intelligent in any way shape or form. It's just automated madlibs.

Please, Firefox. Please don't fall victim to this nonsense. The world does not need the ONLY MODERN BROWSER that's actually any different to all the others (which by the way, again, are all just Google Chrome in a different mask. Yes even THAT browser you're about to mention. AND that one. AND THAT ONE.) going bankrupt and getting bought out by Google or anybody else and switching to Chrome as well because it wasted so much money on this absolute twaddle.

[jonas37]

I don't want any AI in my browser. I specifically use Firefox because it is not bound to any major tech giant, destroying the world.

[rluetzner]

I'd rather not have it at all.

I can imagine that you're very disappointed with how this feature is being received after you put development effort into it.

As things stand, I've not heard a single positive voice on the new feature. It's very likely that that's due to me living in a certain bubble, but overall I see a huge pushback on anything related to AI from regular people. The only people pushing AI seem to be big corp leaders and startups that are out for insane world destroying VC money.

I'd prefer Mozilla to take a strong stance **against** AI, similar to [Procreate](https://procreate.com/ai).

[Skandalfo]

Please don't spend effort in this kind of support in the core browser.

I could wonder why Firefox instead doesn't provide a functionality to create, edit and share spreadsheets natively inside the browser, or a built in database of cooking recipes...

Right, you see the pattern. These chat bots already can be supported by accessing web pages or via extensions.

Please don't spend effort in this kind of support in the core browser.

[yayroos]

Literally switched to librewolf as soon as i heard about this. Drop the AI nonsense and build real features for privacy conscious people trying to escape the google-opoly. 

How did mozilla lose their way this badly? 😞

[deeryeen]

Hey ! Please do not. 🙂

[E_L_]

I really really really dont want this. Please do not contribute to the en**bleep**tification of the internet. Be the browser who does better!

[hamakei]

Hell, no. Nobody asked for this. We don't want it. If people really want such BS let them have it via an Add-on. Don't integrate it into the main browser.

[kocie]

generative ai is theft, full stop. i cannot support it, and in addition to all generative ai being blatant plagiarism, llms often spit out dangerous and incorrect information and they do it in such a way that they appear trustworthy if you aren't being highly critical, making them even more dangerous and reprehensible in my opinion. furthermore generative ai is destroying the environment at an alarming rate heretofore not seen by mankind. it MUST be stopped. 

[Wimpyimp]

How many people have you gotten actively telling you to stop. Spelling it out for you. So many attempts to politely explain have been patronisingly dismissed or completely ignored

Have you forgotten who your userbase are? You seem to think we're all stupid but even the ones without a technology background are here because they care about privacy. You're actively implementing a known privacy risk. And expect people to not have strong reactions to it?

Frankly, **bleep** every single person at Mozilla who thought this was a good idea and that they could get away with it. This company can crash and burn with all the others investing in this **bleep** for all i care. if you continue down this path i will find a different browser that actually respects privacy.

Shame on you.

[bui]

Hell no

[another_user]

I won't be accessing this feature due to ethical concerns*, however I will be contributing to it, involuntarily. This is not a simple "don't engage if you don't like it", it is already harming the community I am part of and the planet I am living on - whether I engage with it or not. Quality information is already getting harder to access due to the proliferation of AI generated content, this does not help.

[Irina]

I will not try out the feature. I want Firefox to stay a decent browser free from any AI "features". You can do so much better.

[Elbi]

From a browser I want:
* pages to load, ideally quickly
* security and safety options
* some light personalization: bookmarks, theming, extensions to forward/block/... IPs

I don't need, want, or accept unnecessary garbage that slows down or negatively affects my experience just because it's one of your yearly company goals. Keep this stuff, no thanks.

[kartikynwa]

I don't mind you wasting your developers' time on chasing the latest fad or bubble to seem hip and cool but please put it behind a compile time flag so that distro maintainers can keep such functionality completely removed if they desire.

[dbat]

Don't want any "AI" stuff in Firefox.

[photex]

I am fully opposed to any of this invasive AI garbage. We're boiling the oceans to generate endless streams of bull**bleep**. It's sad to see Mozilla go down this route. What reason do I even have now to continue using Firefox? Nothing differentiates you from the scum if you do this.

Ad measurement? AI chat crap? Mozilla insists on constantly kicking own goals... starting to think your C level are all plants by Google or Microsoft to remove all incentives for using Firefox instead of Chrome or Edge. 😞

Please abandon this course of action.

[mechmayhem]

I really do not want this integrated into Firefox. Given both Brave and Opera already have AI assistants integrated in their browsers, Mozilla has a chance here to be the one notable browser to reject this. It isn't necessary, we can access ChatGPT and other services already in the browser if we so desire. 

[ilma]

this goes against everything you claim to stand for on your site or "manifest". reckless, unneeded and embarrassing.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/07/ai-climate-change-energy-disinformation-report

"Further, Dodge adds that those with expertise in AI, particularly people in power at tech companies, should establish ethical principles to limit the technology’s use. The goal should be to avoid climate harm and instead help reduce it. “It needs to be part of the value system,” he says." (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ais-climate-impact-goes-beyond-its-emissions/)

[DT909]

Absolutely not. No. We do not want this. The well of Generative AI has been so thoroughly poisoned by mass privacy violations, mass stealing of content, widespread use of it to scam and deceive, and rapid acceleration of climate destruction due to how resource intensive it is, that any positive effect it may have (which, by the way, is next to nil) is vastly outweighed.

And you can tell us over and over that 'its all optional, its all private' as much as you like, but we know how this story goes; how long until its mandatory and can't be switched off or opted out of? How long until the temptation of mass profit leads to our data being sold off either for AI models or for yet more advertising, or both? Because it's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".

That is where you stand with this as a company now; integrating any generative AI features at all, however optional, would betray our trust in the brand- trust you've worked hard to build up. A not insignificant number of people will drop your browser if you do this.

So with all that said, I say again;

NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. WE DON'T WANT IT. CANCEL ANY PLANS TO INTEGRATE GENERATIVE AI FEATURES IMMEDIATELY AND NEVER, EVER CONSIDER USING THEM AGAIN.