this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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NO! I don't want AI in my Firefox. If Mozilla really adds AI, I will consider switching my main browser since Firefox 1 came out.
AI generated alt-text running locally is actually a fantastic accessibility feature. It's reliable, it provides a service, it can absolutely be deployed securely.
It's fine to be critical of technology, it's not fine to become as irrational about it as the tech bros trying to make a buck.
Not irrational to be concerned for a number of reasons. Even if local and secure AI image processing and LLMs add fairly significant processing costs to a simple task like this. It means higher requirements for the browser, higher energy use and therefore emissions (noting here that AI has blown Microsoft's climate mitigation plan our of the water even with some accounting tricks).
Additionally, you have to think about the long term changes to behaviours this will generate. A handy tool for when people forget to produce proper accessible documents suddenly becomes the default way of making accessible documents. Consider two situations: a culture that promotes and enforces content providers to consider different types of consumer and how they will experience the content; they know that unless they spend the 1% extra time making it accessibile for all it will exclude certain people. Now compare that to a situation where AI is pitched as an easy way not to think about the peoples experiences: the AI will sort it. Those two situations imply very different outcomes: in one there is care and thought about difference and diversity and in another there isn't. Disabled people are an after thought. Within those two different scenarios there's also massively different energy and emissions requirements because its making every user perform AI to get some alt text rather than generate it at source.
Finally, it worth explaining about Alt texts a bit and how people use them because its not just text descriptions of an image (which AI could indeed likely produce). Alt texts should be used to summarise the salient aspects of the image the author wants a reader to take away for it in a conscise way and sometimes that message might be slightly different for Alt Text users. AI can't do this because it should be about the message the content creator wants to send and ensuring it's accessible. As ever with these tech fixes for accessibility the lived experience of people with those needs isn't actually present. Its an assumed need rather than what they are asking for.
Local and secure image recognition is fairly trivial in terms of power consumption, but hey, there's likely going to be some option to turn it off, just like hardware acceleration for video and image rendering, which uses the same GPU in similar ways. The power consumption argument is not invalid, but the way people deploy it is baffling to me, and is often based on worst-case estimates that are not realistic by design.
To be clear, Apple is building CPUs that can parse these queries in seconds into iPads now, running at a few tens of watts. Each time I boot up Tekken on my 1000W gaming PC for five minutes I'm burning up more power than my share of AI queries for weeks, if not months.
On the second point I absolutely disagree. There is no practical advantage to making accessibility annoying to implement. Accessibility should be structural, mandatory and automatic, not a nice thing people do for you. Eff that.
As for the third part, every alt text I've seen deployed is not adding much of value beyond a description of the content. What is measurable and factual is that the coverage of alt-text, even in places where it's disproportionately popular like Mastodon, is spotty at best and residual at worst. There is no question that automated alt-text is better than no alt-text, and most content has no alt-text.
That is only the tip of the iceberg for ML applied to accessibility, too. You could do active queries, you could have users be able to ask for additional context or clarification, you could have much smoother, automated voice reading of text, including visual description on demand... This tech is powerful in many areas, and this is clearly one. In fact, this is a much better application than search, by a lot. It's frustrating that search and factual queries, where this stuff is pretty bad at being reliable, are the thing everybody is thinking about.
Just use librewolf or something, or if they incorporate ai, I'd be surprised if an ai-free fork doesn't pop up quickly
+1 for LibreWolf. I've been using it for ~2 years and it's better than Firefox from a privacy perspective. Development is active, so updates are being pushed regularly. As for vertical tabs, you can easily achieve it with Tree Style Tabs. I strongly recommend it.
Tree style tabs is amazing, +1 for that
I've looked at alternative forks of Firefox before, but there were two problems for me: a) most are not up to date or slow to update, and b) hard to trust my browser to any community or other company. You see, I actually trust Mozilla, specifically Firefox and Thunderbird. At least the AI is local only, but it would add another attack vector and bloat for no reason to me. We'll see if it can be disabled.
Librewolf is quick to update, it's just a hardened fork of firefox
Accessibility is “no reason”?! I never called someone ableist before, but… gosh, you're coming close.
You misunderstand me. "bloat for no reason to me" means it is no reason to use to me. I don't care about alt-text in PDFs.
I think that sounds like a cool use case. If it runs locally what's not to like?
Plus I think there will be a way to disable it (like with local translation we have rn).
Local translation is amazing, they just need to polish the settings.
The visually impaired will certainly agree that not helping them with a local AI model is a sacrifice worth being made for the purely moral stance of “no AI at all”.
/s obviously
Are you aware that Firefox Translate uses AI models[1] to translate text and it’s already included in current versions of Firefox?
[1]: not a completion/instruction LLM, but still very much a “language” model
Don't know why you anti-AI so much. An on-device AI is absolutely fine to me, and it's not like Mozilla will force you to use it. Remember the world is not about only you but also people having disabilities.
Remember the world is not about only for people with disabilities. Secondly, this is a nonsense argument, because this does not "require" Ai. Especially not for every user. If its integrated into Firefox and I cannot remove it, then its very much forced. Why not make an extension for people who need or want it? (nobody needs this)
Hey. Hey? Hey. Hello friend.
You just got good advice. Remember that the world is not only for you.
Like, it's super not for you. It's mostly not for you at all. If you ask me whether I care about things for people with disabilities or things for you, you don't even chart. That's only two options and you're not even second on that list.
So yeah. Good advice.
I think there is only one thing worth answering in your reply:
For web page translation, it is considered a very basic feature that should be there by default in all mainstream browsers (e.g. Chrome), but Firefox hadn't provided this feature for a very long time.
For any AI-assisted accessibility feature such as image tagging, my opinion is that it is even more important to make it easily turn on, rather than requiring user to search and download some extensions, which might be a too hard task for a disabled person.
You missed my point entirely. If it is an extension that is installed by default, because a minority needs it, then at least the majority who don't want it can remove the extension. This is especially more important because it is AI and not a regular program. AI is always a black box that cannot be verified.
And if its too hard for a disabled person to install extension, then its probably too hard to use Firefox in the first place. That's nonsense argumentation. But that's not even my actual argumentation and I think you guys try to misunderstand me, just because I don't like what you like. AI in the browser is bullshit idea, it does not matter if its disabled or not person. And not something "required" as the base minimum, that cannot be removed.
That all sounds pretty reasonable to me. You AI holdouts are going to have accept it in some form sooner or later.
You have no idea what freedom is, if you think I have to accept bullshit.
Do you use autocomplete? AI in some of the various ways that's being posited is just spicy autocomplete. You can run a pretty decent local AI on SSE2 instructions alone.
Now you don't have to accept spicy-autocomplete just like you don't have to accept plain jane-autocomplete. The choice is yours, Mozilla isn't planning on spinning extra cycles in your CPU or GPU if you don't want them spun.
But I distinctly remember the grumbles when Firefox brought local db ops into the browser to give it memory for forms. Lots of people didn't like the notion of filling out a bank form or something and then that popping into a sqlite db.
So, your opinion, I don't blame you. I don't agree with your opinion, but I don't blame you. Completely normal reaction. Don't let folks tell you different. Just like we need the gas pedal for new things, we need the brake as well. I would hate to see you go and leave Firefox, BUT I would really hate you having to feel like something was forced upon you and you just had to grin and bear it.
Thank you for the understanding and not getting stuck on the choice of my words. I have to say that local AI is much more acceptable to me and remedies some key points I dislike about AI usage in normal cases. But I don't like the idea of an AI, as it is a black box and it is not possible to verify. I mean in source code we can look at it, test it, modify it, build it. But with an AI like this, we cannot. There is a lot I don't like about AI.
But autocomplete question? Well yes off course I use autocomplete for my programming, just not with AI. Only simple autocomplete. And I like that.
Generative AI will be forced on you, regardless of whether you want it in your life. The entire world is moving in that direction very rapidly. We are not just talking micro scale like which web browser you use - every institution you rely on in your daily life will have AI implementation at some level.
No. Sad that you don't know what freedom means. AI is marketing bullshit and the way to control you. Nobody will force me to use it and you know it. Just because you tell me that I have no choice does not take away my choice. You are a Linux user godamn, you should know that better.
Don't let corporations control you with AI. Don't be a lemming.
How exactly do you think stuff around you works? Machine learning is everywhere gobbling up massive swaths of data wherever possible. Insurances, work shift planning, goddamn Spotify. All are using ML and have for years. To think you can just stay away from those Models is ridiculous.
Which does not mean that I HAVE TO USE IT ON MY MACHINE! Shift planning, inusurances are not software I am using and it is not MY RESPONSIBILITY. I don't use Spotify and also that is not an important program such as my Firefox. You guys search for reasons to accept AI and let you control by every company for no reason. All in the name of "accessibility", when in reality this is not needed.
lol
I am just hoping governments will see the massive issues and copyright problems with AI and ban that garbage outright soon so all these companies eager to add their AI trash to every single product they ship will stop.
There is no general copyright issue with AIs. It completely depends on the training material (if even then), so it's not possible to make blanket statements like that. Banning technology, because a particular implementation is problematic, makes no sense.
The only relevant training material to make a truly complete dataset must include copyrighted material or you do not have a full set of data to draw from and thus it is useless. Stop defending this horrible technology.
What do you mean "full set if data"?
Obviously you can not train on 100% of material ever created, so you pick a subset. There is a a lot of permissively licensed content (e.g. Wikipedia) and content you can license (e.g. Reddit). While not sufficient for an advanced LLM, it certainly is for smaller models that do not need wide knowledge.
You can't even rely on Wikipedia to be right, and how is reddit "content you can license"? Its articles are owned by their sites, and the original stuff posted there is from the poster and is usually wildly inaccurate or outright wrong (or even downright dangerous). And even when they do pull in tons of stuff they shouldn't, the results are frequently laughably wrong.
You're not making a good argument for LLM crap here. Just accept the fact that it's a failed technology that needs to be shut down. Please. How are people so excited and gung-ho over this garbage, failed, laughably bad technology? It's almost like people WANT chaos.
Wikipedia is no less reliable than other content. There's even academic research about it (no, I will not dig for sources now, so feel free to not believe it). But factual correctness only matters for models that deal with facts: for e.g a translation model it does not matter.
Reddit has a massive amount of user-generated content it owns, e.g. comments. Again, the factual correctness only matters in some contexts, not all.
I'm not sure why you keep mentioning LLMs since that is not what is being discussed. Firefox has no plans to use some LLM to generate content where facts play an important role.
Sure hasn't helped AI/LLMs with accuracy yet. And never will. Computing doesn't actually think and reason, it's just mashing together bits of data it has, and if what it has now isn't accurate, how is anything going to be?
You and others continue to harp on how great this new technology is and meanwhile we have seen it do nothing but absolutely, laughably fail. You keep saying it will get better, but it won't. It is limited by the fact that computers don't work that way. Sick and tired of the people justifying this garbage "tech" that is stealing art, code, text, etc, sucking up huge amounts of power, and giving wrong information, telling people to do dangerous things and even kill themselves because computers don't know the difference.
Just admit it. AI/LLM is garbage. Please. Stop being a massive fanboy for something that has clearly, evidently, 100% failed miserably and dangerously.
I think you are replying to the wrong person?
I did not say it helps with accuracy. I did not say LLMs will get better. I did not even say we should use LLMs.
But even if I did, non of your points are relevant for the Firefox usecase.
Meh, if it will do stuff like merging results in the awesome bar, I'll happily take it.
The problem is, this should be an addon that people can install or at least, remove. I don't want AI in my text editor, in my browser or in my operating system.
I mean the address bar. If I type in a port which I know something is on locally, it shows me five different entries pointing to the same thing. I'm saying they should be merged. You and I know that this is programmatically simple and should be the default behaviour, however in this age, at least according to marketing, it's AI.
And I am saying, if they want to it, then it should be an addon and not installed by default that cannot be removed.
I'm sorry, but you're being ridiculous. Why should it be an add-on to say merge two identical rows from a database query?
Why not? I think you are ridiculous. Just for two identical rows to merge them is not a good reason to introduce AI into the system. This could have been done without AI, but if they really want an AI, then it has to be an addon. If its really that simple, then there is no need for an AI.
I'm guessing you haven't had your coffee yet, because I blatantly said
If you want to fight for the sake of fighting, please go find someone else. It's too early for this stupidness.
Maybe you should stop insulting people like an idiot.
You asked me why this AI for this simple two line merger should be an addon and I explained to you it should because its an AI. If you have no good argument, then insulting people won't make you right. You make an dumbass example, I give you an answer and you give me this stupid reply. idiots get blocked.
I honestly don't think you're a bad person, I just think that you're blinded by a red mist right now. You'll think back to this later and laugh about it, I'm sure. Have a good day.
You're just irrationally disliking it based on the name "AI" and nothing factual.
You have no idea why I dislike it and create nonsense judgement over my disliking. I think this is a normal human defending position of you, because I dislike something (there are good reasons for) that you like.