Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
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@firefoxwebdevs I can only speak for myself of course, but I'm someone who is strongly opposed to sneaky approaches, like hiding things in submenus or requiring people to go back later to disable new things, for example. And I'm also strongly opposed to basically everything in the current generation of "AI" (LLMs, GenAI, etc.) - but personally I wouldn't consider this sneaky, as it's immediately visible that there's a second choice to make, at the exact moment you disable "AI".
Of course if that stops being the case and the second option gets hidden behind an "Advanced..." button or foldout for example, it would be sneaky. But in the way it's shown in my mockup, I would consider it fine as it's both proactively presented and immediately actionable.
(I do still think that exploitative "AI" things should be opt-in rather than opt-out, but it doesn't seem like that's within the scope of options that will be considered by Mozilla, so I'm reasoning within the assumption of an opt-out mechanism here)
@joepie91 they will be opt-in, but different people have different opinions about what that means. For us, it means models won't be downloaded or data sent to models without the user's request.
However, some folks have said the only meaningful opt-in would be a separate binary for the browser-with-AI, or even having to compiling it manually.
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs stop putting AI in your products, full stop. The machine translations made with the help of native speakers is 1000x better than the slop you're feeding us
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@firefoxwebdevs But wait… what if the developers used AI to help develop the code in the browser itself? Does that mean AI kill switch purists should then rather not even use the product at all?
@mdavis it's definitely a complicated topic! I guess it's down to us to figure out a model that best serves most people, while providing options to cover the rest.
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@tasket @angelfeast https://paracrawl.eu/moredata says "This is a release of text from Internet Archive.... The project also used CommonCrawl which is already public." Those crawls quite famously/infamously include copyrighted content. I don't see anything to suggest they filtered those datasets for public domain annotations. (Not that such an annotation would be enforceable, but it would at least be an indication of intent.)
@tasket @angelfeast It's not clear to me that I'm looking at the right place. Is this the data being used by Mozilla? I'm hoping that could be resolved by more than the 10 minutes of research I spent on it. I'd like even more for it to require much less research to understand the supply chain of a product offered as a public service. I've also got lots of reasons not to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
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@firefoxwebdevs I don't care. Local translation in FF is on the level of free early 2000s web translators. So maybe just remove it and add it again, when it's production ready
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@m0rpk @firefoxwebdevs quite honestly, you're off the mark, **a lot**.
A browser with a built-in translator is a door opener for the open web for so many people that don't read English well enough to benefit from the dominant corpus of technological, cultural and scientific websites.
Firefox could indeed remove that functionality and instead of letting people translate websites on their phone make them use the google translate app that directly. Congrats on how you've advocated for the open web.@funkylab Mozilla only have to make that functionality possible to add via a plugin for people who want it. That way user choice, accessible web translation, and separation between core and optional browser functions and are all satisfied.
There is nothing to say Mozilla have to deliver that plugin - and nothing to stop them from doing so either. Or anyone else.
I'd argue that's how the open web should work. Not mandating optional behaviour within the browser itself.
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs grow a pair and assert your products’s vision.
The loudest people are are unreasonable and do not understand what they actually want.
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs what exactly do you refer to as „open data”?
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@funkylab Mozilla only have to make that functionality possible to add via a plugin for people who want it. That way user choice, accessible web translation, and separation between core and optional browser functions and are all satisfied.
There is nothing to say Mozilla have to deliver that plugin - and nothing to stop them from doing so either. Or anyone else.
I'd argue that's how the open web should work. Not mandating optional behaviour within the browser itself.
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@mdavis it's definitely a complicated topic! I guess it's down to us to figure out a model that best serves most people, while providing options to cover the rest.
@firefoxwebdevs I don’t think you can make any assumptions then without granular switches that let the user control every facet. In which case, this kill switch is probably less a binary checkbox and more a slider or a series of discrete options. And as a Firefox and Thunderbird user, we are used to lots of toggles and switches under the hood, so I’m fine with that kind of control.
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@flxtr @firefoxwebdevs as someone who used these in the early 2000s: no, it's not. It's not as good as DeepL, but it's worlds ahead of machine translation in the 2000s.
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@m0rpk @firefoxwebdevs mozilla did deliver this as a plugin in the beginning. What's your point? "Don't make the web open, unless it's something that I approve?"
@m0rpk @firefoxwebdevs what exactly is bad about not delivering functionality that benefits basically everyone (my English, I claim, is fine, but I can't read a word of Japanese and Spanish is mostly guesswork; most humans read no more than 3 languages)? How exactly does it detract from Firefox being an enabler of the Open Web that they do, by default, enable the Open Web crosslingually?
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@chillicampari @joepie91 fwiw I asked about translation because we're figuring out what to do specifically about translation.
@firefoxwebdevs then I think it comes down to- is translation specifically considered "AI" by your own definition (not personally your definition, how it is treated internally by Mozilla)?
If it is treated and handled as "AI" then yes, following the idea of including what is defined by Mozilla as "AI" into the "AI kill switch" it should be disabled when the "kill switch" is toggled.
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@joepie91 they will be opt-in, but different people have different opinions about what that means. For us, it means models won't be downloaded or data sent to models without the user's request.
However, some folks have said the only meaningful opt-in would be a separate binary for the browser-with-AI, or even having to compiling it manually.
@firefoxwebdevs "Without the user's request" is quite ambiguous, though. I'm reminded here of Google, which put the AI tab before the Web/All tab, displacing it so that people would unintentionally hit the AI button and "request" it. It's a small and plausibly-deniable change that nevertheless violates the user's boundaries, and difficult to call out and stop even internally within a company or team. I've seen many companies and software do the same thing.
A genuine opt-in would, in my opinion, look something like a single "hey do you want such-and-such features? these are the implications" question, presented in a non-misleading way, and if that is not answered affirmatively then the various UI elements for "AI" features should not even appear in the UI unless the user goes and changes this setting. It's much harder for that to get modified in questionable ways down the line, and reduces the 'opportunities for misclick' to a single one instead of "every time someone wants to click a button". It also means users aren't constantly pestered with whatever that week's new "AI" thing is if they've shown no interest.
Such a dialog could still specify something like "if you choose Yes, Firefox will still only download models once you try to use a feature", to make it clear to users that it's not an all-or-nothing, and they can still pick-and-choose after selecting 'Yes'.
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@m0rpk @firefoxwebdevs mozilla did deliver this as a plugin in the beginning. What's your point? "Don't make the web open, unless it's something that I approve?"
@funkylab My point is that I'm Very. Tired. of every company trying to cram unwanted cruft into their products at the expense of core features.
Of course people should be able to translate webpages.
You may not have noticed from my tone but I was being somewhat hyperbolic for rhetorical effect.
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@funkylab @flxtr @firefoxwebdevs and by listening to these people it will *never* be good because they shit all over themselves if anyone uses an algorithm from 10s.
@jonathankoren @flxtr Don't get me wrong, I'm angry at @firefoxwebdevs for trying to press LLMs into places they don't need to go, and generally becoming complicit with commercialization (and "enshittification") of the web, but maybe, just maybe, let's actually criticize the things worth criticizing instead of going around dogpiling on Mozilla / Firefox developers at every corner.
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs start with the list of stuff that LibreWolf rips out?
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@firefoxwebdevs But wait… what if the developers used AI to help develop the code in the browser itself? Does that mean AI kill switch purists should then rather not even use the product at all?
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@mdavis @firefoxwebdevs I do not want to use any product that has been developed using "AI" code generation tools, especially not if it is security critical software like a browser
@mcc @firefoxwebdevs I would mostly agree with this if you added this at the end of your statement: …by an idiot programmer or one who didn’t grow up and learn to code properly during the decades before AI LLMs.
In reality, I don’t think either of us are going to get our way on this one.
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
I would say every feature in everything should be a separate toggle to the best of its ability.
Also, by "open data", I hope you mean "the data's license gives consent to be used in this way", not "the data exists on the web somewhere".
