Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.

[Gast]

@firefoxwebdevs I'm not voting in that poll, needs a "No AI" option.

[Gast]

@m0rpk I second this.
I cannot for the love of me think about a moment where I opened my webbrowser and thought:
- "I miss a search engine"
- "I miss a translation engine"
- "I miss webpage summariser"
- "I miss an LLM front-end" (I don't even use LLMs)
- "I miss a client-side LLM"

I just wanna open my webbrowser and not be bothered by anything dammit...

@firefoxwebdevs

[Gast]

@dahukanna@mastodon.social @DiogoConstantino@masto.pt @firefoxwebdevs@mastodon.social Machine Learning is a field that's wider and older than the LLM/diffusion/whatever mess that's been marketed as "AI" and led to the current bubble. Labeling it as "a subset of artificial intelligence" is at best a simplification and at worst an outright manipulation to confuse the public about the realities of the technology. Google is not a trustworthy source for this topic.

[Gast]

@firefoxwebdevs@mastodon.social i maintain that the "AI kill switch" is a stupid name for such a feature. Stop calling it AI, this term is meaningless as indicated by the disagreement in this poll and the need to ask in the first place. You should rephrase it in a way that makes it more obvious what features would be included.

I mostly care about the AI kill switch from a privacy standpoint. I don't want any chatbot sidebar, or a summarization tool that sends my stuff off to some API. But I do like device-local ML features that work offline.

For me, these two toggles would be perfect:

[ X ] Enable ML features
|
\-- [ ] Enable ML features that require an Internet connection.

Turning off the top one would obviously disable translations. But turning off just the bottom one would obviously keep translations.

[Gast]

@funkylab @m0rpk @firefoxwebdevs

Quite the friendly tone here. Firefox shipping a feature that unilaterally makes derivative work of any written content on the internet without the author's review or consent isn't exactly part of my definition of the open web. Please don't conflate your opinion on widespread machine translation with the term.

Translation also brings its own ethical can of worms. Say Firefox mistranslates a critical information, resulting in loss or injury. Who's responsible?

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@Tacitus @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @tante jake's already tried "well what even *is* opt in, it's so impossibly complicated you know"

(it isn't, make it an extension)

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@errant @zzt @jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs that's *mister* object

[Gast]

@jaffathecake @davidgerard @zzt @firefoxwebdevs

brother what the hell are you even fighting for here lmfao

[Gast]

@firefoxwebdevs @240185 Did you mention the overall dim view that users express at the prospect of losing their favorite browser to AI hype? Mozilla's problem here is far greater than "how should we implement a kill switch." How is Mozilla planning to restore the trust they've lost by employing deceptive patterns against their user base?

[Gast]

@OliviaVespera @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard @tante Waterfox has pledged no AI and won't be accepting those bits. So has Zen.

[Gast]

@duke_of_germany

"I want something
I can call my own,
that ain't a Ford Cortina
or a mortgage on a home!"

[Gast]

I think it's OK if they make *some* of those things... provided they aren't baked into the browser or installed with it by default.

(A search engine and a translator plugin seem fine. LLM stuff can eff right off.)

[Gast]

@rowmyboat @firefoxwebdevs Yep. It's exactly what the parents of a toddler do when they want the child to feel like it has control. "You can have ANYTHING you want, so what's it gonna be, apple or banana?"

It's insulting

[Gast]

@reflex @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard @tante I meant can I respond to the poll. But i guess now I see the OP I see what I should do.

[Gast]

@TheEntity it's fair to say I dislike things being attributed to me that I didn't say & aren't true.

[Gast]

@firefoxwebdevs While I understand some people actually appreciate translations, this part should be an extension. I don’t understand why you have to build it either.

To me, the translation part is just annoying. If I don’t understand a language I’ll find the content in a language I do. The translations are horrible (seriously) anyway. This also brings jobs to proper translators who know what they are doing (and understand context and culture).

[Gast]

@jaffathecake Have you defended your e-bushido on the term killswitch yet

[Gast]

@duke_of_germany Das nenne ich mal eindeutiges Feedback

[Gast]

@pelle @rose_alibi because they're trying to launder the chatbots by equating them with long pre-existing uses of ML that don't need an ever expanding slop machine to work.

[Gast]

@OliviaVespera @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard @tante lol I misread you sorry!