Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux
Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Why not just ship it without any of the AI stuff and give users the option to install and use it instead of bloating the application? This also confirms that the stuff is essentially OPT OUT instead of OPT IN
This should just have been an extension. Having this as a core integration makes the browser have more surface area for attack.
If compromised, it won’t be an easy fix like disabling/removing an extension.
Looks like execs behind closed doors are just trying to water down the Firefox brand until it’s hollow and then jump ship.
And also ….. will the kill switch turn off the AI entirely … or partially? Since the AI system is baked in, will elements of it still operate in the background even if you turn off the switch?
Not sure what you mean by “will it operate in the background”? The current (and planned) features collect no data. The “operate” when you use them. Disabling them will remove them from the UI.
lol …. so they won’t change how they function … just remove them from sight
out of sight, out of mind, right?
Whenever I trust big corporations … or even big organizations with a lot of power in their hands … it’s never usually good for common people like me and you.
No, they won’t be used at all, and will be hidden from view, if turned off.
What he wrote doesn’t seem ambiguous on this at all. But we’ll see.
So you agree that it will be baked in and impossible to actually turn off. Yep.
Otherwise, they would have made it an extension, right? If it’s optional, it needs to actually be optional … that’s what am extension is. That’s the whole point of them.
You can not push the button that says AI.
You can also hit the kill switch that completely removes that button.
That’s opt-in enough.
If it starts reading pages or doing things without you pushing a button, that’s an issue.
No
In their defense a very tiny percentage of users even open options and of those an even smaller actually change stuff.
Maybe slighlty different for Firefox as probably more power user use it than other random programs. But basically if something is not enabled by default, it doesn’t exist.
Because they’re counting on people who know nothing about technology using the AI stuff when it’s placed in front of them.
Many people love AI, I have a lot of acquaintances who actively seek out the best “AI browser” whatever that means. It makes sense for mozilla not to fall out this bandwagon just yet.
All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what ‘opt-in’ means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That’s unambiguous.
Sounds like they will be opt in, not opt out
No, go deeper into that thread.
The dev has a really hinky defention of “opt-in” thats basicslly “yes we push all this on by default and realize it will be the nirm for most of our users because of that, but you technically dont have to interact with it so thats opt-in.”
I mean yeah, that’s a fair point, and the dev said that themselves, that the definition of opt in is ambiguous. The definition they seem to use is that AI won’t run unless you explicitly tell it to, and I think that’s ok. There’ll be a button that you can press to do some AI action and you can hide it using the kill switch.
I do hope the kill switch isn’t hidden behind 5 layers of menus
Thats not ambuguity. AI will be opt out in firefox, which is them abandoning core principles like user choice and privacy.
They can do that, but playing like they arebt by redefining well established term in UI/UX to try to hide the fact that they are is disengenious, and cuts right through the “we will earn your trust back” messaging made by the same dev.
Let’s have a look at how it works now, so we don’t need to speculate.
When I configured Firefox for AI, I got to choose my LLM of choice. I chose Claude. Now, if I select some text, I get a context menu option that says “Ask Anthropic Claude”, which branches into these options:
Notice the last one? That’s not a “buried” option. That’s as front and center as the options to use it. Mind you, if I decide to not use it, then nothing happens. The only thing that’s changed is that I now have an optional shortcut for LLM features that open in a sidebar instead of a new tab.
Oh, the humanity.
I don’t see why there is a big outrage. Sure I’m not a fan of the AI features and I certainly will disable them but it’s tot like they’re forced upon me. Some people like (want) AI in the browser and good for them. For me, it doesn’t change my experience at all
(Commented this separately on purpose)
Come to think of it, I do enjoy the translation feature in Firefox
The alt-text tagging is pretty amazing according to my sister (blind), too.
I’ve been thinking the same thing. The online tech community is a very small part of a much larger pie and they need to serve multiple audiences. As long as it can be turned off and truly be off, who cares?
People don’t trust that it can be truly turned off and that it won’t act maliciously in some way. That’s really the crux of the whole saga. We’re at a point where phone companies are getting survey results that say that 80% of users either don’t care about AI nor use it or find that it actively makes their user experience worse.
candyman337@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
The bubble is AI and they want some of that bubble investor money is my guess, so they put optional AI
rainwall@piefed.social 21 hours ago
“On by default unless you run down a setting buried in a menu” is the thinnest type of optional in computing.
Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 6 hours ago
It’s like saying cosmic is optional on Pop_OS.
Sure, you can rip it out.. but is it really optional?
candyman337@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
That’s fair, but also if you search AI in the settings it shows you all the options