- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
“It’s safe to say that the people who volunteered to “shape” the initiative want it dead and buried. Of the 52 responses at the time of writing, all rejected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shoving AI features into Firefox.”


Yeah that’s really awesome.
…But it’s also something the anti-AI crowd would hate once they realize it’s an 'LLM" doing the translation, which is a large part of FF’s userbase. The well has been poisoned by said CEOs.
I don’t think that’s really fair. There are cranky contradictarians everywhere, but in my experience that feature has been well received even in the AI-skeptic tech circles that are well educated on the matter.
Besides, the technical “concerns” are only the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that people complaining about AI often fall back to those concerns because they can’t articulate how most AI fucking sucks to use. It’s an eldtritch version of clippy. It’s inhuman and creepy in an uncanny valley kind of way, half the time it doesn’t even fucking work right and even if it does it’s less efficient than having a competent person (usually me) do the work.
Auto translation or live transcription tools are narrowly-focused tools that just work, don’t get in the way, and don’t try to get me to talk to them like they are a person. Who cares whether it’s an LLM. What matters is that it’s a completely different vibe. It’s useful, out of my way when I don’t need it, and isn’t pretending to have a first name. That’s what I want from my computer. And I haven’t seen significant backlash to that sentiment even in very left-wing tech circles.