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!

[xenianth]

you keep replying to people giving critiques over the privacy issues of all LLMs with requests for... LLMs without privacy issues? you aren't even reading what you're replying to. we're all saying the entire thing is needless and ethically unsound, not that we want you to use different models.

[thomy2000]

Please stop destroying Firefox, pretty please.

Also, this is already possible. It's called tabs and copy paste. Those who want to use plagiarism machines can do it that way.

[aminought]

People are also plagiarism machines. You and me. So what? Mozilla must go to such experiments, otherwise it will be left out. This is progress, and the people who prevent it are no better for me than green activists: they do nothing themselves and do not let others do it.

[thomy2000]

🐑

[tribbleglorp]

It is a good thing to be left out of a fad. Fads are fleeting and everyone ends up worse for going along with the obviously terrible idea once the bubble has popped.

[Kwonunn]

"This is progress"

If this is progress then progress can jump off a cliff.

[Mardak]

Are you referring to the Summarize option responding too similarly to the original text? Do you have suggestions for alternative prompts that are less likely to repeat previous works?

[ffffff]

He might be referring to the larger discussion around LLMs generating output that is eerily similar to the training inputs. "Plagiarism machine" is a term used derogatorily by people against current uses and production of the tech to refer to popular AI and LLM models that took the world by storm. See the Copilot case for a related example. In general, this discussion around the internet also touches upon the morality of LLM training using enormous datasets composed of many works whose authors did not consent to it, and who wish not to be included.

[wutongtaiwan]

Firefox can now have multiple chatbots, but none of them can be used in China, so I recommend adding chatbots from China. For example, ERNIE bot, the Chinese name of this bot is called “文心一言”. And the other one is Kimi Chat.  Their official website:  Kimi Chat • SmartAI   文心一言 (baidu.com)  

[Mardak]

Do you know if these chatbots support passing in prompts with ?q= A quick test of https://yiyan.baidu.com/?q=你好 doesn't seem to work.

[wutongtaiwan]

This AI bot requires an account login, which may be due to this reason why it does not work

[danyeaw]

As a user, I want a great performant web browser, I don't want LLM features integrated at all. If Firefox wants to work on this, it should only be offered as an extension.

[Mardak]

Have you noticed a decrease in performance when the feature is disabled or even enabled but not open?

[mega]

Obviously it'd take even longer to build.

[facni]

It would be nice if we were able to do right-click over the chatbot's panel to, for example, copy, paste and translate text or take screenshots.

[Mardak]

Thanks for the feedback. It seems like we should be able to add the right-click menu to the sidebar at least with copy and paste as those should already work with keyboard shortcuts, e.g., ctrl-c / cmd-c. Others like translate might need some additional work to get the appropriate text from the sidebar content.

[AdventureGamer]

NO. No, no, no, no, NO. NO AI in the last bastions of privacy on the internet!!! What the hell!!!!!!!!

[Emmic]

when are we going to get a post like this on the new toolbar and url box thing that's just come to nightly? because I have many thoughts about that for firefox to pretend to care about....

[KellyClowers]

The local PDF image alt text generation is an example of a good and useful "AI" feature.
This "AI chatbot" stuff is a an example of a bad and stupid "AI" feature. Not many people want this, those that do can install an extension or something. The LLMs use too many resources, and for at best very little benefit. Most of the time there is no or even negative benefit. This is not something Mozilla should be using or promoting. Granted, it is a fad that will be over in a couple years anyway most likely, but even in the mean time you shouldn't be supporting it.

[ffffff]

Yes! I was so happy when I saw the alt text generation plans, because it was the first time any tech organization I follow announced a use of AI that not only was I not disappointed with, but was actually excited for. It showed that there are plenty yet unexplored and helpful use cases of AI that don't involve the endorsement and promotion of unethical big tech companies and their products.

[Mardak]

Would you expect Mozilla to do something similar to Common Voice and image-to-text training data but for LLMs?

[ffffff]

I don't know, Mardak. While the idea sounds beautiful in principle, as I mentioned in another comment, that feels dangerously close to a moonshot. Big data seems to be the name of the game, so I doubt Mozilla could ever hope to catch up to the big players who crawled all the internet. Expecting that feels unfair and akin to setting both parties up for disappointment, along with a hefty waste of resources.

[Mardak]

Are you saying a local LLM would be good or bad? Something optimized to use low resources for securely handling private data could have more benefit than existing chatbots for some users.

[Honeebunny]

Booooo!! I expected better from Firefox, but you're just proving that companies as a whole don't have or care about ethics. Disgusting.

[MarryAurora12]

best

[meias]

Absolutely not. There was a post from Proton on mastodon recently that said something to the effect of AI is inevitable. I take problem with such a stance as it really does not have to be inevitable. On the contrary, the only inevitable thing about AI is that it will inevitably cause harm. Stealing information to train the model, causing massive amounts of environmental damage due to the resources needed to power it. This is not the path we need to go down.

I understand Mozilla is trying it's best to stay relevant, and to bring people back to Firefox. But we shouldn't be trying to stoop to the levels of the people we are purporting to be better than. A true genuine focus on the mission to serve people's needs, not the needs of corporate investors, is how we achieve that.

[cannoness]

I have no use for this feature; I just ran away from Chrome and back to Firefox recently over AI/privacy and it looks like I'll be leaving again for a browser not falling into the hype. I am saying this as someone who writes AI Software professionally, not a "change resistant user." Consider your audience.

[Mardak]

What aspect of privacy are you concerned about? Mozilla isn't collecting your prompts or selection to train a model.

[JHeuser]

All LLMs either rely on privacy violations, plagiarism, or both.

I notice you ask a lot of people to give recommendations for privacy preserving LLMs. I want you to name one that is privacy preserving, doesn't plagiarize (meaning it has a public list of all training data, and it's all used with permission), and doesn't use tremendous amounts of energy. If one exists, it should be the only one firefox allows, as that's the only moral and ethical way to go about this.

[PatchMixolydic]

Out of curiosity, would you able to swear, under penalty of perjury, that none of the LLMs exposed through this feature were trained on https://patchmixolydic.com?

[tribbleglorp]

Are there any even left? Obviously Chrome and Edge are out, Opera seems to have it in spades if the youtube sponcon is anything to go by, and let's not talk about Brave. My beloved Fox was the last one standing as far as I can tell. 😞

[draconicrose]

Vivaldi.

[andwhyisit]

Librewolf might be worth looking at.

[wutongtaiwan]

You can learn about Brave's AI features.After entering the search term in the address bar, the AI option will appear,After clicking, a chatbot on the side will appear to reply to the content related to the search term,I recommend using Mozilla's own AI,I don't trust other companies' AI,I believe Mozilla can better protect privacy,And this AI should have no chat limit、No login required、No geographical restrictions,Chat history is only stored on the local computer

[Mardak]

I believe that feature isn't necessarily on search engine result page as it can generally include the page contents to the chatbot. Are you wanting the Firefox feature to automatically share the page with the chatbot instead of requiring text selection?

[wutongtaiwan]

Maybe you can give a button to choose whether or not you want to share the page. I think Brave's AI is more helpful and useful to me

[wutongtaiwan]

I'm willing to share the page with the chatbot, but there may be some privacy-conscious people who will object, so a toggle can be provided in the browser settings for the user to decide whether to enable it or not, and not to enable it by default.

[Mardak]

Would a different interaction, e.g., a dedicated "share page" button, separate from the current text-selection interaction work? Instead of a toggle, someone could decide not to make use of a 1-click "summarize" or "help me understand" on a search result page.

A toggle could also be useful such as part of another action, e.g., share the page with chatbot when opening reader view, so it's still one interaction after enabling?

[wutongtaiwan]

I feel like it's a little better to separate the share page button from the text selection interaction

[ffffff]

If Mozilla commits to going ahead with this feature unchanged despite significant localized backlash in this tiny discussion thread, you'd better start planning and preparing both the technical and the average user targeted PR for the release wayyy ahead.

Privacy-Preserving Attribution is arguably good, yet tech media still made a circus out of it, with countless users denouncing "Mozilla's Evil Fall to Advertising Revenue", completely missing the point of the feature and rarely taking the time to read a single paragraph on what it actually does. It's unfortunate, but some things really didn't go well with PPA's release.

This feature is arguably bad. Straight-up, no arguing, simply bad for many people. I don't know how one could spin this well—maybe there isn't even a good strategy, just a least bad one—but Mozilla must lay the groundwork, somehow. Right now, I feel like I can see the writing on the wall, except instead of writing it's a stain and the wall is actually Mozilla's reputation.

Again, I hope you folks figure something out, and it all goes well, because I'm not terribly excited about going into another space with numerous angry users who may or may not have read past the title of an article, to try and add nuance to the conversation and explain what Mozilla is actually doing and why. I know nobody asked me to do this, but I feel like I have to, sometimes, because it really ought to be Mozilla's job, yet the ball keeps getting dropped.

Maybe the majority of users don't care, so it seems advantageous frustrating a couple thousand to please a million, or something. I don't know if I agree with that choice, but it's your prerogative, I suppose.