Regular, non-expert internet users find it fun, or even amusing, to play gacha games. And yet the sentiment about a potential new gacha game panel built into Firefox has been overwhelmingly negative. While sophisticated gamer aesthetes find those creations gauche or even offensive, other cultures find them perfectly addictive.

Most of the people that see gacha games as a valuable use of their time on this earth belong to demographics that are dismissed by all you internet weirdos. It's an incredibly mainstream experience now. Regular people have no problem collecting trading cards, making the numbers go up, and spending money on in-game purchases. If Firefox wants to keep up with the times it needs a built-in gacha game so that it can protect the privacy of all the billions of people who will see it and understand that Firefox is the web browser and gacha game platform made for them.

If Henry Ford had given his users what they wanted, he would have built a faster horse.

Users want AI right now because a lot of people have spent a lot of money to convince them they want it. A few years ago, they wanted crypto and VR; a few more years from now, they'll want something else. We're already seeing evidence that the current AI boom is an unsustainable bubble. Will "hundreds of millions of users" still be using ChatGPT after OpenAI's investors get tired of losing billions of dollars every year, and decide it's time to start squeezing their customers for more cash?

This kind of trend-chasing is what happens when the people in charge have no real principles or vision underlying their actions. Firefox didn't beat Internet Explorer by following the crowd; it won by delivering a product that was better, and doing things nobody else had done before (like tabs). In order to do that, the people making it had to have a strong vision of what a "better" browser would look like.

"I don't want AI"

"Actually you do though, but if you don't then you're an out of touch pretentious old weirdo and should just shut the fuck up"

How about making it a nice plugin? Could it be something that is optional and not hard to disable? Or is that too much to ask?

AI is the new bit of crap you now have to disable when visiting family. new apple device? disable in settings, disable in firefox, disable in duckduckgo. i see the benefit of ML in sciences but for gen consumers it’s just more personal data collection for sale so it can fuck right off

because there's not a single documented use case for ai that is worth the destruction of the planet.

I spent much of the last week having the distinct honor of serving as MC at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona

Thanks for telling me you work for Mozilla, this instantly invalidates the rest of your Mozilla praise.

Regular, non-expert internet users find it interesting, or even amusing, to generate images or videos using AI and to send that media to their friends. While sophisticated media aesthetics find those creations gauche or even offensive, a lot of other cultures find them perfectly acceptable. And it’s an inarguable reality that millions of people find AI-generated media images emotionally moving.

You're describing the internet equivelant of ignorance and figurative poverty, where people don't have the knowledge or the resources to make better choices (fast food deserts, faith healers, the PowerBall) because they are institutionally deprived. This is the same class of users/consumers that big companies look for those exact same qualities in to shill the exact same AI garbage to because they don't know anybetter. This article is suggesting Mozilla flood the streets of a poor neighborhood with their own crank because their crank is cut less. I see the argument as bad, I see the premise as evil, and I see the rhetoric as manipulative. Respectfully, no.

Not a single mention that Mozilla acquired an ad company, tried to put user-profiling functionality in the browser for ad networks to use, changed their ToS to remove the part that says they don't sell your data and partnered with a sketchy "data protection" service that it turned out was owned by the same person as some people-finder data-brokers.

Maybe if we want an open source project to be the bastion of private AI that respects your data and doesn't surveil you, as Anil suggests, perhaps it should be a company that we still trust?

Induced demand. Having it there means people will use it, doesn't mean they wanted to or asked Firefox to add it.

'We pushed shit on everyone and a bunch of them are using it' never ever ever vindicates pushing shit on people. People use shit that's pushed on them! Do you know how low that bar is?!

I am a vocal defender of the underlying technology, and this is still some bullshit.

Although this has been heavily downvoted, the author has a point: what do private, safe AI experiences in a software mean for the common browser user? How does a company that was founded as an 'alternative' to a crummy default browser take the same approach? For those that do and will use the tech indiscriminately, what's next for them?

Just as cookie/site separation became a default setting in FF eventually, or the ability to force a more secure private DNS, what could Mozilla consider on its own to prevent abuse, slop, LLM-syncophantism / deception, undesired user data training, tracking, and more? All that stuff we know is bad, but nobody seems to be addressing all too well. These big AI companies certainly don't seem to be.

Rather than advocate for Not AI, how do we address it better for those who'll simply hit up one of these big AI company websites like they would social media or Amazon?

Is it anonymous tokenization systems that prevent a big AI company knowing who a user is, a kind of 'privacy pass?' Is it text re-obsfucation at the browser level that jarbles user input so that patterns can't emerge? Is it even a straightforward warning to users about data hygiene?

The above is silly, and speculative, and mostly for conversation. But: maybe there's something here for your everyday browser user. And maybe we ought to consider how we help them.

This article had the opposite effect on me than I think the author intended.

Good piece. I have been largely impressed with Firefox's "AI" features. They appear to be just normal useful features they are calling "AI" for marketing.

It's simple... Don't want it, don't use it. There, problem solved! Now get over it...