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.
i wish they would release a second browser instead of whatever this is
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 think they should keep the murderous name, because at this point who DOESNT want AI dead?
Will stick to Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium but thanks anyway
Or they could just ship it without the AI
Just don’t add the surveillance and spam features in the first place. 👍 Fuck off, Mozilla.
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.
So, an actual artificial brain?
Can I secretly upload mine?
EDIT: Don’t worry! It’s small enough to fit!
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.
It has to be opt-in or they can go fuck themselves
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.
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.
That is nice and all I rather not have AI baked into it at all. I switched to Watefox instead.
Wasn’t Mozilla Corp. supposed to be an ethical enterprise? How’s this ethical at all in any respect? How companies like these got convinced that so-called AIs are something users overwhelmingly want to use? Why, by default, users would want to fuck the atmosphere and several markets, so they can have shitty tweaked images and probably bad answers to the most simple questions?
Thing about it currently is, these “ai” tools built into browsers are a huge security risk… they have access to basically everything the browser does. A prompt on some web page can tell the ai to go do what ever the he’ll the attacker wants? Your bank login Details, sure why not! Your saved passwords built into Firefox sure why not… like no thank you
Any Firefox forks that support HDR? I know ff doesn’t on its own but I also don’t really want to use chrome or edge. I’m open to suggestions.
