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!

[TheJobberwock]

Please don't add AI. PLEASE. It just eats electricity for no real benefit. And that's besides all the AIs built on mountains of stolen data.

[AlexSeanchai]

Adding long-form-autocucumber to Firefox won't be enough of a disimprovement to send me back to anything Chromium based, but it will certainly be enough of a disimprovement for me to switch to a Firefox fork that isn't sucking AI venture capital and therefore isn't inherently untrustworthy.

[Foxgloves42]

Please don't!

[Ravenesque]

there is exactly no reason to force AI into the only usable browser currently available. i would like to continue being able to tell my friends that i like Firefox and recommending they switch the way i did. if you add this AI crap i will actively discourage the switch i've been pushing among my friends.

[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

[samarkandar]

Not only should Mozilla not implement AI, you should fire whatever lemming-brained empty suit suggested doing so.

[ajet]

Absolutely not. I personally think theres a time and place for ai, but I'm sick of scrolling past the ai results on google everytime I look something up because the results are so often wrong or even dangerous. I'm sick of instagram having meta ai in the search bar...and for what!? What does the ai do for me that simply searching for keywords don't - on instagram, at least? If I have to double check everything the ai tells me, its ultimately not even saving me the time of doing my own research or writing.

Is its usage worth the energy costs? How long will these tools be sustainable, both financially and environmentally? Will they have to eventually implement pay walls like so many other ai tools out there?

Have heard stories of younger people now using ai instead of search engines, and taking complete ai hallucinations as fact because they believe the ai is infallible. Is this really worth it? I turned to Firefox specifically because it does not have the same BS Chrome does.

I understand this is intended to stay optional, and an effort to stay relevant, but I fear it will become more and more integrated like it has for every platform.

AI is potentially an amazing tool for recognizing patterns in medical scans or research photos, heck, in the early days I saw it being used for a tool to help blind people identify surroundings via their phone camera. Now I feel it's become a marketing gimmick that is solving zero problems. Eventually the sparkle will fade and we'll be left with the wreckage mass misinformation and energy overconsumption caused.

[Ark]

Just do not do this. Not ever, not for any reason. Don't.

[webenjoyer]

This message is for @Mardak and anyone else at Mozilla responding to this obvious headache. I'm taking a look at your replies and I must give you some frank advice.

You're asking questions like "Are there ___ to make ___ better?" and "Would there..." People can see that you are trying to use reframing speech and you need to stop and take a step back. You're trying to reframe this by finding specific aspects of the feature to make this seem more palatable. I see this a lot from AI enthusiasts. From one software professional to another, I'm here to tell you that there isn't any one aspect of this feature that is the problem. The feature is the problem. It happens sometimes. You are focused on a second-order problem when the first-order problem is right there.

As a software professional for over 15 years, I give you the following advice.

Imagine a product that does bad behavior X. To make the product better, you remove X. Sometimes X is "leaks the user's information" or X is "a vulnerability". Now, imagine a product that does bad behavior X with an additional bad aspect of Y. We don't focus on fixing Y, we focus on X. I hope you can understand that.

Privacy is not the problem with LLMs, although it is a major problem, because privacy a fundamental problem. I'm telling you that LLMs are fundamentally problematic in the same way as poor privacy practices. LLMs are more fundamentally problematic than pretty much anything you can imagine: security, privacy, performance, reliability, you name it. It is attacking the very reason for being alive and thinking about any of these problems in the first place.

I mean, imagine that everything you've ever been interested in or made in your life was taken, analyzed, and recreated with subtle tweaks by anyone at the click of a button. Multiply that by every word or piece of art that all of humanity has made. Everything is reduced to a spreadsheet of vectors. Now, we market that into a product that people pay for. Even if it were free, don't you see how messed up that is? We should be spending efforts on education, promoting arts and individual expression, giving people reasons for going out into the world and being influenced by it in a nuanced way. And then letting them struggle to remix it in their own unique way, EVEN IF the "product" is "not good".

Machine learning can be such a gift of automation--in medicine and other methods of broad analysis, in dangerous and tedious work. These are things that we may not have the time to spend on or things that we don't want to spend our time on.

LLMs are completely misguided because they automate the parts of life that we are trying to spend our time on! Writing, art, expression: that's the good stuff! Don't take that away.

If you can't understand all of that in a deep, intuitive way, such that it seems obvious to you, you need to take a step back from computers for a few years until you realize what's really important in all of this work. I can practically feel your discomfort from here with this absolute deluge of negative feedback, and I feel for you. What might seem like the noise floor to you might actually be something more like the cosmic microwave background. Not something to ignore. I give this feedback to you as a friend to the world. Hope that makes sense. Take care.

[lovelyjubbly]

The floating AI icon that appears (sparkly emoji), feels like it appears too readily. On some pages, any kind of dragging or moving action produces it. It would be nice if it stuck to the context menus, or was a bit more discerning, for example should it really appear if a single word was highlighted? I think it does still have usefulness appearing immediately after highlighting a paragraph though, and it's also a way of promoting that this feature exists to us users.

[trer_]

Hi Mozilla, this is a terrible idea.

(I'm not going to "try out the feature", the mere idea of indulging that request abhors me)

Your web browser keeps existing because people are passionate about having an alternative to the crap that the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are throwing at us. These companies care not about their users and you cannot compete with them on their playing field. The only reason you keep existing is because people trust you to care more about them, their freedom, and their safety than about short term profits.

Please don't keep gambling that away on hype and buzzwords.

[Hjalti]

I do not want AI services in the sidebar. I do not want AI services anywhere to do with Firefox or any of Mozilla's other software.

[DamienW]

Extremely disappointed to see Mozilla partnering with multiple anti-privacy, anti-user, and environmentally damaging companies to integrate tools and systems which reinforce a paradigm of manufactured, coerced consent to people's choices over whether and how their data is used. The values embedded in the operations of LLMs and other "generative AI," as presently construed and created, predominantly sit in direct opposition to everything Mozilla has been understood to work towards and hold as Good.

If this were a project about Mozilla working to building a better, more ethical, consent-focused, environmentally sustainable LLM or "GenAI" system, then I would support it without reservation; more than that, I would applaud it and point to it as a meaningful change in the status quo and a good path forward in the world of "AI." As it stands, this just reifies the worst tendencies of "AI" companies, casting them as "inevitable" or otherwise without alternative; Mozilla of all places should have the vision to resist these PR lines about "AI," and at least try to imagine a different way forward.

[threeley]

Absolutely not.

[mdifhfkdmhahdjf]

I will stop using, supporting, and recommending this browser if these changes to implement AI take place.

[icaruswings]

Don't even bother. If you do this I will seriously consider abandoning Firefox, and I've been a loyal user since I was old enough to operate a computer. Keep AI out of Firefox.

[zerosumactress]

I frankly have zero interest in supporting or using these services, considering how much electricity, water and other basic utilities are consumed by the data centres needed to run them

[Chrispd235]

Please do not do this. Most people don't know how bad AI is for the world from an ethical and environmental standpoint. And a lot of folks who know and keep on using it do so out of malice for the people they would normally rely on to do the work that AI tries to do.

Please stand against this. Do not implement ANY AI in FireFox. We've already seen research concluding that it frequently causes more work for people overall, and it frequently gets info or details completely wrong. It can be dangerous when looking up safety info, on top of many other issues.

Please, do not do this.

[Yoa]

I really really really do not want AI integrated to the browser, I'm so tired of it being pushed down our throats, even when is not actually helpful nor convenient. I started using firefox because they seemed to actually care about their users, their data and their privacy, it's a shame to see it going down the same road as every other browser out there.

[sketchguess]

To once again voice the most common response to this:

Absolutely not.

This will be the feature that pushes me to stop using Firefox official builds entirely, and prevent me from supporting any other Mozilla products. I have no interest in supporting a company that is using generative AI in it's current forms, full stop.

[LC87]

AI has firmly shown itself time and again to be unreliable and consequently useless, please reconsider using time and resources towards this fool's errand.

[jenapher]

Firefox is the last bastion for a safe and secure browser option. Implementing AI for the sake of keeping up with the current fads will irreparably damage Firefox users' trust in Mozilla. Chatbots and other AI systems are a slippery slope towards loss of internet privacy and user autonomy. 

[Josapr]

For the love of all that is good, don't add any generative AI.

Either you should know better about the privacy, copyright, or misinformation concerns, or you're willfully ignorant as a software developer at this point.

Either that or you heard the buzzword of the month and decided to just "add AI" without knowing anything about it.

In any case, please don't use any generative AI.

[jenapher]

Firefox is the last bastion for a safe and secure browser option. Implementing AI for the sake of keeping up with the current fads will irreparably damage Firefox users' trust in Mozilla. Chatbots and other AI systems are a slippery slope towards loss of internet privacy and user autonomy. 

[polyworth]

This is such a bad idea... I'll have to find another browser if this goes through. I'm so sick of AI in places it really doesn't need to be.

[movax-13h]

No thanks

[redarmyscream]

For the love of god, DO NOT DO THIS!
Enough with the mediocre machine being shoved in our collective faces!

[Aeg]

No. If you only want comments from people who are willing to try an AI feature, your results will be inherently skewed.

[Skrimiche]

Big, emphatic "NO" to this. I use Firefox over other browsers specifically because it's not bloated with features like AI, but if it starts doing that then I'll have to start using an alternative.

[Twinklepuzzle]

If Firefox is going to become yet another greedy, trend-chasing, "screw the users, we do what we want" browser, why are we even here? I appreciate that this "feature" is opt-in rather than opt-out, but I do not trust that it will stay that way. I don't trust anything related to AI, because modern AI is inherently exploitative. As someone who went to school for computer science in part because I wanted to learn about machine learning/AI, I am strongly against 90% of all AI, and 100% of generative AI. The fact that Mozilla would even consider working with such a wasteful and exploitative technology makes me lose a great amount of trust in the organization, and if it does get implemented, all of the remaining trust will evaporate.

There are some very narrow conditions where some forms of AI might be acceptable (some of the early cancer detection algorithms would qualify, for example). This isn't one of them.

I'll be honest, I don't know of very many browser alternatives that aren't chrome/chromium-based (I welcome replies with suggestions lol) but I will do my best to find one that doesn't use AI and drop Firefox like a hot rock if this continues.

[amlynn]

NO. I dont want AI services.

[Wynndawnstrider]

Please don't, the whole reason the majority of people use firefox in the first place is because it actually respects their privacy and doesn't include bloated useless features like AI.

[Rhube]

Please don't do this. We don't WANT this. So-called AI is trained on stolen data and the size of the models needed requires a massive amount of resources that are accelerating climate change. There is no moral way to engage with 'AI'of this kind. Please, please stop. The user base has not asked for this.

We use Firefox because we want a browser we can TRUST not to take our data against our will. This is the opposite of everything Forefox is meant to be. The markets are rejecting AI. Your consumers reject AI. This is an awful idea as well as an awful, awful thing to do.

[cinnabuntastic]

Kindly make it extension only or don't add it at all. I switched to Firefox because I wanted to avoid the sort of invasive BS Microsoft and Google are pushing, and now you're turning around and doing the same thing? And it's all well and good to sit and say that you definitely promise it'll be totally private no data scraping at all no sir not ever, how long will that last? I don't want to have to turn off a baked in setting; Microsoft already keeps forcing me to do that over and over and over and over again. If people really want an AI feature, give them an extension to install and leave the rest of us out of this.

For ethical reasons, if this moves forward as a permanent change, I know I will certainly be moving to another option and encouraging everyone I know to do the same. (And I have seen earlier responses: please do not reply to me insisting it's private or it'll be turned off, I genuinely do not trust that anymore. Too many times I've seen that promise being made and then reneged in the end. The environmental impacts of generative AI as it currently exists far exceed anything, and this feels more like advertising than it does anything anyone wanted- no one asked you for this. Do better.)

[i_cannot_today]

stop

[dscully]

PLEASE no AI!!!! It is unhelpful and actually makes anything you're trying to do worse, it's destructive to the planet, it's anti-privacy, it's just awful in every possible respect. PLEASE don't follow this awful awful trend.

[B_r_u_n_o]

Remove this sh***. We do not want this and at least I will immediately uninstall Firefox and begin using a fork if anything related to AI appears because of an update.

[samblindspot]

jesus christ absolutely not

[Lonery]

Completely agree with everybody in this thread, NO. I am not sure why the mozilla team thought something so invasive for users and bad for internet and world as a whole would fly with their userbase