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Firefox’s AI Kill Switch is a Trap: How Mozilla Made AI Your Problem (www.quippd.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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TL;DR: Mozilla recently released AI controls for Firefox: a single control panel that lets people disable AI features in the browser or pick and choose which to leave on. On the surface, this sounds like a win for user choice in an era of AI-everything. If we dig deeper, you can start to see that the kill switch isn’t the whole story. This feature acts like an accountability sink. By giving you an off-switch, Mozilla’s leadership shifts the ethical burden of AI onto the user - turning their design choices into your responsibility.

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[–] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

Yes and no, this is not about others being worse, it's about being a total non issue in Firefox.
First is that if you don't use them, the Firefox AI features do NOTHING. And on top of that you can disable them completely.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I understand your guys thing in general but really such a big thing should be opt in. I mean heck I would prefer to not even download the components but I get that is not feasible. Still it would be super simple to have it off by default and have a popup asking if the person wanted ai features enabled with an at least on option being no. never.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    Most ordinary users never make a setting change,having it off by default, would make it so those users will never be aware the features are there, and having translation available on the address bar is a major feature.
    Since they do no harm, I can honestly not see a reason why it should be opt in?
    The people that want to turn it off are just contrarian, and possibly oppose AI as some sort of principle, disregarding that in this case it actually helps people that want to read articles in other languages, and blind people to have meaningful captions on pictures that aren't properly captioned for the blind.

    You do you, but this is not you doing you, you are being contrary at far greater cost to other people, regarding something that shouldn't even be an inconvenience to you. You just choose to be difficult without having a real reason. Except you hate the word AI.

    What AI feature is it exactly, that you think is detrimental to your normal use of Firefox?

    I mean heck I would prefer to not even download the components

    Why? And how many other features would you prefer not to download? The plugins interface maybe? Video and audio Codecs? Support for PNG? The theming capability? How many plugins do you have? What about AI features is it that is so especially horrible to you?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    well again given the use of popups for other things that are opt in I don't see why it can't be used here. most users can say yes to a popup and no to one if the popup gives that option. Again im not wild about the llm code even being in the system as its all just bloat. Off by default just makes it easier while I move away from the software.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    its all just bloat.

    Here you go:
    https://www.brow.sh/

    If you want a lean no bloat Web Browser there are many that fit that label way better than Firefox.
    Firefox was always a full featured browser with more features than most.

    Another nice little browser would be Falkon:
    https://www.falkon.org/

    There are dozens of such browsers, Firefox is great because it's complete, go get your incomplete browser with only aged features elsewhere, that doesn't have the new features Firefox offer.
    Some of us use for instance the page translation quite often. If you are not used to that, you are limiting your browsing to only sources in languages you understand. I understand 5 languages, but not for instance Chinese and French.

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