After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser.
On Tuesday, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was named the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the beloved Firefox web browser used by almost all GNU/Linux distributions as the default browser.
In his message as new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo stated that Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software while remaining the company’s anchor, and that Firefox will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
What was not made clear is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier today to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.
Repeat after me. “There is no such thing as a non physical kill switch”
Yep. Have no reason to trust it does what it says it does. Only way to prove that is for someone to dig into the browser while its running to debug/investigate/etc, things that are way above most peoples capability.
and even if it does what it says it does, no reason to believe that it wont default to on with the next update.
That’s nice but it’s not good enough. There needs to be a compile flag so the AI code isn’t even included at all.
i wish they would release a second browser instead of whatever this is
Or they could just ship it without the AI
I think they should keep the murderous name, because at this point who DOESNT want AI dead?
Would be nice if folks stopped calling LLMs AI. If they are true AI, they would be able to learn how a kill switch works and disable it
We already have a term for “true” AI, it’s AGI - Artifcial General Intelligence.
Both AGI and LLMs are types of artificial intelligence, as are things like OCR, speech to text systems, or chess engines, and a ton of other things, it’s a vast field of computer science.
AGI is a hack term that is only necessary because people have been misusing the term AI. All that other stuff is just really fancy scripting and math. There’s no I involved, A or otherwise.
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
To add an example, in video games we call it AI whenever the enemy appears to make a choice.
So, an actual artificial brain?
Can I secretly upload mine?
EDIT: Don’t worry! It’s small enough to fit!
Just don’t add the surveillance and spam features in the first place. 👍 Fuck off, Mozilla.
It has to be opt-in or they can go fuck themselves
Will stick to Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium but thanks anyway
Oh, it “wasn’t made clear” SUUURE. Addressing a blowback could be way better if you admitted a mistake instead of gaslighting your users. Not the way to earn back lost trust.
Until the bad press dies down and they feel like removing it
The Microsoft way:
“Why do you disable that”
“You’re weird. Everyone uses that”
“You cannot disable that”
I think it says something that they’re backpedaling at all. This isn’t just “bad press”, its a real market for people who want products that are “AI Free”. And since Firefox is the other-other browser, its a market they’re feeling obligated to fill.
I’m already trying out LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on mobile.
So far everything is working, probably another week of testing/using and then I’ll just uninstall Firefox.
That is nice and all I rather not have AI baked into it at all. I switched to Watefox instead.
They could save themselves all that bullshit by just not bothering with any of it!
Or they can give people to option to use or not use it.
If you want it, it’s already there for you. Nonconsentually shoved into every single thing you use.
Absolutely it should be opt in not opt out
Why put the user through the issue of turning it off instead of having it off by default and letting those who want to use it turn it on? That’s some bullshit on Mozilla’s end. Fuck them.
Jesus you guys are so fucking whiny. Takes two seconds.
It’s not about the effort, it’s about the default. The US considered breaking Microsoft up over this. “You can always uninstall it” isn’t the point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
That’s not an educated opinion. 90% of users don’t read shit, they just use things, badly. If you don’t care about those doofus’s protection and you think “It’s their own fault”, you’re accidentally being a bit of a douche canoe.
If a person doesn’t have any issues, then is it actually a problem they need to read up on and disable? Why is there any fault to be had at all in that case? Assuming everyone’s use case is the same is also not an educated opinion.
If individuals start having problems, the tools to fix them are there and it’s on the individual to use them. If large swaths of the user base start having problems, that’s Mozilla’s issue to fix. Right now, any prediction of which way this goes is just a guess.
I am whiny as fuck, which is why I fucking dropped everything by Mozilla from my life. Those are 2 seconds I can add to my porn addiction streamline.
I’ve been a user of Firefox since before it was called Firefox. I’m exploring different options now and I’m not interested in how they try to bandaid this. I know if they put in a switch it’ll eventually be taken out.
