I am going to be brutally honest here: I'm militantly anti-AI and think its proliferation has caused innumerable issues societally, including offloading simple cognitive … (läs mer)
I am going to be brutally honest here: I'm militantly anti-AI and think its proliferation has caused innumerable issues societally, including offloading simple cognitive tasks or questions that could have been directed towards actual living breathing people being instead handed over to something that doesn't know what words even mean, just where they might go in a sentence. Many people share my concerns, and have voiced them across social media, and have gone out of their way to criticise and take a stand against what we see as a plague.
So it is with much frustration that I find out Mozilla are aiming to turn Firefox into "a modern AI browser", per new Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo's first blog post in the role. I have already gone out of my way to turn off as much of the AI nonsense in Firefox as I can — even downloading a plugin to remove the Google Gemini summaries, because they're all less than useless and absolutely defeat the point of using Google in the first place — and now here we are; it's going to be shoved down our throats, whether we wanted it or not (which, of course, many of us didn't).
I didn't anticipate that this would be the thing that forces me to make an account for the support forum of all things, because my experience of Firefox up to this point (an experience spanning almost as long as Firefox has existed) has been a largely positive experience, and I even make use of Thunderbird for my email needs. Now, all of this is being swept aside because of corporate greed and an outright rejection of its userbase.
This same userbase is very strongly and vocally against this, and it is within our power — even if we don't necessarily want to have to do so — to move elsewhere. Therefore, I urge Mozilla and its leadership to read the goddamn room and recognise that we don't want this, stop forcing it upon us, and focus on being a browser that is nice to use without having to rely on the Infinite Plagiarism Machine to do it.
If there is no about-turn on this or almost prostrated assurances that you would have to directly opt in (not out, but in, specifically; as in, I would have to turn everything on myself to even see a single bit of it) to this otherwise seemingly enforced "modern AI browser" experience, I will stop using both Firefox and Thunderbird and will actively recommend against them. I've already gone some distance towards excising the likelihood of encountering AI in my life, and I will continue to do so if I have to, even if it comes at the cost of software I've been using ever since I was a teenager.
Your call, Mozilla.
Choose responsibly.
