im so sick of all these ai things being added into programs. i picked firefox specifically because it didnt have obnoxious ai intergration. now it does and i want to explode. ive spent so much time going through every little thing to make sure ive turned all the different ai settings off. im so tired of it!!!
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Hi,
May I ask you what the reason is that makes you try to avoid AI?
Meanwhile, hereâs a quick overview of the AI-powered features in Firefox:
- AI Chatbot in Firefox Sidebar: This feature allows access to AI chatbot from the sidebar. If it was enabled accidentally, you can disable it by unchecking the AI chatbot option in the Firefox tools section.
- AI-Powered Link Previews: AI is used here to enhance link previews with extra information. This is completely optional, and youâll find steps to enable or disable it in the linked article.
- Smart Tab Groups: This uses AI to automatically group similar tabs. If you havenât turned this on, it wonât affect your browsing. No action is needed unless you want to explore it and youâll find steps to enable or disable it in the linked article.
- Alt Text Generation for PDFs. This feature uses AI to generate alt text for images in PDFs. Itâs off by default, so you wonât need to do anything unless you choose to enable it.
- Perplexity Search Integration. Perplexity is being offered as an optional built-in search engine. If you prefer not to use it, you can remove it from your search engine list using the steps in the article.
- Firefox Translation: Unless you use it, no action is needed.
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Completely agree. Saw an article recently that new Firefox ceo wants to add more. Horrifying and useless.
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Friend, simply Google why is AI bad and you will find thousands of articles about how the data centers are destroying the environment at a much quicker pace than they were before because of AI. You will also find many many articles about how AI ruins our brains and keeps us from being as creative as we could be. AI doesnât work well, lies to us, destroys our brains, and destroys the environment. There is zero upside.
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Your response may partially be related to only 2 of the 6 features I mentioned
Well let me go point by point for you then:
AI Chatbot in Firefox Sidebar: LLM chatbots consume massive amounts of water and energy to provide a facimile of human interaction, and you have no way of insuring their information dispensed is accurate or statements made with positive intent.
AI-Powered Link Previews: I do not want AI to gather info from every page my current site hyperlinks to, itâs been proven that theyâll use malicious inputs as instructions and take hostile actions against their user. Furthermore, I donât have any reason to believe the AI wonât hallucinate in its summaries of non malicious pages!
Smart Tab Groups: This is a case of when all you have is a hammer. Thereâs literally no need for this, if I want my tabs grouped Iâll do it myself stop trying to guess and stop using AI to do it.
Alt Text Generation for PDFs. Once again, AI hallucinates. Under no circumstances should it be relied upon- listing âpath that leads over a cliffâ as an option will encourage fools to follow it, no matter how bad the idea.
Perplexity Search Integration. For the love of- AI is NOT a search engine, it is generating a collection of words based on blackboxed internal logic that has no guarantee of accuracy or relevance. We have search engines already and Ai just keeps making them worse.
Firefox Translation: AI Does not translate, it generates predictive text. Telling people these are accurate translations is going to get someone hurt. We had translators before AI and they were programmed, not generated! Stop! Stop including this shit!
Who are you anyways? Why have you picked this fight? You sound like the CEO personally hired you to shill for AI because he wanted to counter the pushback against his new toy.
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Iâm not a Mozilla employee⌠And who are you Shane?
Regarding your statements. While itâs true that AI makes mistakes (and hallucinates), and you shouldnât rely on it, it can still be more than useful. Particularly, your example with translators: we did have translators before (when?), but the quality of translations was much worse.
Also, thereâs something called local LLMs that Firefox uses to power its own AI features. They are models downloaded to your device and functioning like offline apps, handling all the data locally (and not sending it anywhere).
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god yeah! im so sick of gen ai, i just dont care and everything is trying to shove it in my face. and its so wasteful anyway, especially for something with so little genuine practical use.
i litterally have no use for any of these. I will make alt texts on my own, ill do it for my friends. I like doing things myself. I dont want a chat bot, i would rather talk to a person or just google something myself.
Ive turned off so much and its so annoying. at the very least it should be opt in, not opt out.
Ive gone my whole life without AI, i dont need it now. It doesnt do anything new for me, i dont want stuff forced on me because some guy made an investment.
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Agreed. Its being forced into everything. its replacing programs that are perfectly fine, and bloating everything. im so annoyed of having everything opt out or âignore for 3 daysâ. i dont need or want my browser to have ai. i want to exist in peace
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all translators that are done by a program, ai or not run the risk of being inaccurate. I cannot bring myself to believe that ai powered translation is better than any other translator program. Language is too complex and the fundamental understanding of how something is best translated from one language to another is best done by a human.
translation programs and ai are useful for a quick fix. The ai provides no extra benefits
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you have put this pretty well. The search engine is probably the most annoying one. Why does no browser or website want to search for what i want. I typed in what i am looking for and then im just blasted with results that are out of wack. then i have to spend so much extra time just trying to find what i initially searched for
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As someone whoâs obscure native language was added to translation softwares after the rise of AI, the quality of the translation is much, MUCH worse than smaller, non-ai programs. Consistantly.
Also itâs en environmental blight that brings nothing truly useful. Like, why is a link summary useful? Itâll gain you what, 30 seconds at most?
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Just signed up for an account here to express my disfavor with the âall in on AIâ trend the new CEO seems to be expressing as well.
I moved to Firefox from Chrome because of all the anti-user junk Google was pushing into their browser and this new direction from Mozilla leadership feels familiar. I find AI tools to generally be a waste of resources and are more prone to getting in the way of what Iâm doing than any sort of assistance.
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May I ask how the tools get in the way of what you are doing?
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its so frustrating! i hate having ai forced into everything. i dont want a hallucinating plagarism machine in anything
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Everything you say is beside the point people are making here, which is they donât want or see any personal need for these features, and donât want the bloat and security risks that come with them. I think you not being an employee but spending time and effort trying to convince people who know what they do and donât want in their browser products to consider these âfeaturesâ as anything other than bloatware and security risks they donât want to take is really weird.
Yes, supposedly the features can be switched on and off at the configuration level, but as we all know that is hit or miss (autoplay, anyone?). Frankly, why donât you just skitter off and use it happily instead of wasting your and our time trying to gaslight us into keeping bloatware we have no desire or use for on our systems?
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May I ask why youâre shilling so hard and trying to convince people to want something they donât want? I can see why people think youâre either an employee or a shill for the CEO. Maybe take a look in the mirror and see that your personal infatuation for whatever new junk they want to feed you isnât shared by others in the community and let them have their discussion without your constant nagging intrusions.
Youâre coming off like 90s pop-up ads.
Iâm trying to understand your mindset; itâs interesting for me. By the way, you were not the person I was asking 
Iâll fix that now and ask you: what prevents you from not using the features (and not whining on the forum)?
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Unsustainable, destroying clean water, higher utility bills, proliferation of misinformation, slop, bad lazy art and writing. I donât need AI to poorly rewrite whatâs already written. I donât need AI to have it steal from the artists and writers who freely share their work to begin with. I would be ok with it if it were doing my laundry and washing my dishes and assisting disabled folks with accessibility in an affordable and sustainable way.