A Formal Request: Please don't ruin the browser with AI bloatware.

[thatguyoversea]

Let me preface this with a statement: This is easily the best browser I've used. It's light, it's effective, and it's fast. Lovely stuff all around. Most likely never swapping off.

BUT, there are a few things that could make me change my mind. One of which would be filling up the browser with bloatware chat bots and image generation. Let me explain.

AI as a concept is wonderful. You can generate things from nothing without requiring any skill or talent in the first place to do so. This does, however, immediately pose the issue of: what about the people who do have skill? AI pushes them aside because 'why pay an artist to make art for you when you can pay 0.07 cents per 100 tokens on GPT-3?' Further, the ways that a lot of AIs get their samples for generation is questionable at best and plain bending the rules at worst. Adding such predatory content would be not only unnecesary (because anyone who would want to use it anyway could just find a website), it would be contributing to a poor cause.

Text generation is the same. Many places just pull text from the internet without asking consent of the people who actually wrote the text being used in the samples. Another example of what would be questionably ethical bloatware onto a browser.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is: please don't incorporate AI into the functions of the browser. It's in poor taste, and anybody who cares about AI in their browser has already moved to Edge for their crappy chat bot they're shoving into every little thing they can. Stay pure, Mozilla. 🙂

[indra]

I suspect this suggestion may fall on deaf ears as techbros everywhere rush after the Hot New Trend, regardless of how much environmental destruction and intellectual property violation it leaves in its wake.

[thatguyoversea]

Regrettably, yes, but I have hope for at least Mozilla. They've been pretty good about this so far. At least it isn't brave, haha.

[limealligator32]

I agree, but aside from ethical reasons, there are also practical reasons to do so.

1. Resources. Firefox will never have the amount of data and budget as huge as giants like Microsoft and Google, so competing with them on AI would be a losing battle.

2. Niche. Instead of appealing to the general masses, Firefox could instead focus on what differentiates it from other browsers. Brave already found two, combining ad blocking capabilities with ease of use, and catering to people who invest in cryptocurrencies. One way Firefox could create one is by going against the grain, by focusing on what drives people away from AI.

3. Theme. Not resorting to AI fits the theme of Mozilla of being people-centered. Where instead of delegating decisions to bots and algorithms, they could instead emphasize giving back the power to people, and having contents and community by real people instead of AI generated. And there's actually a sizable community who prefer that as discussed in this article.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/12/23721323/ask-jeeves-remember-when-google-search-worked-ai