Comment on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 19 hours agoWhen I turned it off the translation thingy went away, so I’m not sure if it was AI all along and they were lying about it or not. Just as well, there’s an extension that works fine and it doesn’t reload the page every time I toggled it like the built in one did.
XLE@piefed.social 18 hours ago
The translation is technically AI, but it’s a distant cousin from the LLMs and image generators that have repulsed so many people. And, notably, this is from before AI became marketing hype.
It also produces a joint non-profit venture with a university, rather than today’s weird gimmicks or for-profit partnerships.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
It’s less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn’t call “chemistry” vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.
XLE@piefed.social 7 hours ago
In this case, the vagueness of the term AI is abused by its fans. “Aha, you claim to hate AI, and yet…” they say. They should know better.
“Chemicals” is actually a great example. If someone said “Chemicals are coming out of that factory”, you’d rightfully cringe if a factory manager said “well actually soap is made of chemicals too”
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
I take your point. :)
It’s worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say “we should ban chemicals” it’d be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.
I don’t actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it’s just that it’s an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that’s explicable.
I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there’s people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it’s not what they’re trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it’s another issue.