You reminded me that one use for AI I’d really like is removing all photos of Trump, Musk and Putin from my screen. Another is filtering the twenty reposts of every event in US politics. Alas, I need these in phone apps more than the browser.
Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Does anyone even talk about what the “AI features” are?
Could I, liked darken webpages? Automated ublock filters? Create a price/feature table out of a shopping page?
See, this would all be neat like auto translate is neat. But I’m not really interested in the 7 millionth barebones chatbot UI. I’m not interested in loading a whole freaking LLM to auto name my tabs, or in some cutsie auto navigation agent experiment that still only works like 20% of the time with a 600B LLM, or a shopping chatbot that doesn’t do anything like Amazon/Perplexity.
That’s the weird thing about all this. I’m not against neat features, but “AI!” is not a feature, and everyone is right to assume it will be some spam because that’s what 99% of everything is.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
You don’t need LLMs for that. An iPhone is plenty powerful enough for image recognition and text classification.
That’s sorta the funny thing about AI. There’s tons of potential, but it’s just unimplemented. Even on PC, you pretty much have to have some Nvidia GPU and fight pip setting up python repos to get anything working.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
That stuff is commonly included in the AI umbrella.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Eh, I draw a distinction between oldschool visual recognition and matching some keywords, versus full-blown LLMs. I used ‘AI’ to mean the latter in my comment above, as intended by the post itself. I also have doubts about the effectiveness of the older approaches in regard to the uses that I mentioned.
chunes@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I would use it to block all the people whining about AI
rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 8 hours ago
you don’t even need AI for that and can do it on your phone. Piefeed for example asks you when initially setting up an account “Hey do you want to see stuff about Trump, Musk, etc? no? cool we won’t show you that” and that’s it. works great.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
What indicates that Piefed does this on the client side?
Cherry@piefed.social 11 hours ago
I’d like a AI feature that bounces back on any ads or intrusive crap including propaganda. But AI is being pushed by the same people so if it happens it won’t be genuine and it will just evolve to give the illusion of not being pushed.
FF, any browser, any social media platform , I can select ‘I don’t wanna see this’ or go adjust settings to disable but nah, an update later and it’s back, or it comes back under another form.
It’s still manipulation. And I can’t trust it to manipulate ever.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Does anyone even talk about what the “AI features” are?
The one I use the most is their offline translation. I don’t have to send my data to Google Translate.
My sister (blind) uses the new screen reader stuff a lot.
Mozilla is certainly adding good AI features, but the chatbot integration isn’t something I have much use for.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
Translation and screen reader have been a solved thing for a while, no “AI” browser necessary. I’m all for nice features, but bolting in a chat bot that phones home with activity data ain’t one of them.
mirshafie@europe.pub 20 hours ago
- AI chatbot in sidebar (you can choose which chatbot you want, similar to how you choose default search engine)
- Shake to summarize page (on mobile)
- AI Window (separate from Normal and Private window, upcoming). Apparently it lets you chat with an AI agent to power-browse the internet.
FinalRemix@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
So, nothing.
mirshafie@europe.pub 9 hours ago
Yeah, basically a nothingburger.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
Can’t wait to power browse.
Siegfried@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Are we goong to get power browse or drunk browse?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
The later is the mildly interesting one, but in my experience just not useful enough to do much, even on specific browsing finetunes or augmented APIs.
mirshafie@europe.pub 10 hours ago
I agree. They’re quite vague about what the feature would actually do, and I have a hard time believing that I would use it.
I think it would probably be wiser spending time and effort on other things (like a really good built-in Dark mode or better memory management), but I don’t fault them for experimenting. Worst case scenario they make something that sucks and either remove it later, or you can fork it off.
Zorque@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Apparently it lets you chat with an AI agent to power-browse the internet.
… I feel I have an idea of what this means, but it still breaks my brain just a little bit.
Tehhund@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop?
This is an excellent point: there are potential features I wouldn’t mind trying out. But of course those features aren’t available, because aren’t the features that Mozilla leadership’s buddies in tech are pushing, and often work against what big tech wants.
fodor@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
Right right. If they had real innovation, they would have defined it clearly as you suggested. But they didn’t, so they don’t. It’s all snake oil, again, because that’s the entire AI industry.
frank@sopuli.xyz 14 hours ago
The term snake oil is actually especially fitting for this, due to its origins.
In Britain in the 1700s there was a somewhat common recommendation for using rattlesnake oil from the fat of the snake for skin diseases/rheumatism. The efficacy is debated but it’s got some amount of potential for change (if not help).
This turned into people in the US selling mineral oil as “snake oil” as a total panacea. So a product that actually could do stuff being used as the poster child for a completely useless product that can solve every issue ever, buy as much as you can today.
Snake oil indeed.