I got a copy of the text from the email, and added it below, with personal information and link trackers removed.
Hello [receiver’s name],
I’ve long dreamed about working for Mozilla. I learned how to send encrypted e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ve been a Firefox user since almost as long as I can remember. In more recent years, I’ve been an avid follower of Mozilla’s advocacy work, and was lucky enough to partner with Mozilla on investigative journalism in my last job.
In many ways, Mozilla was the dream – and now, as the leader of the Foundation, my job is to make my dreams for Mozilla come true. What that means, though, is making your dreams come true – for a trustworthy and open future of technology; for tech that is a tool for liberation, not limitation; and for tech that values people over profit.
So I’m reaching out to technologists, activists, researchers, engineers, policy experts, and, most importantly, to you – the people who make up the Mozilla community – to ask a simple question.
[receiver’s name]. What is your dream for Mozilla? I invite you to take a moment to share your thoughts by completing this brief survey.
Let’s start with this question:
Question 1: What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
- Protecting my privacy online
- Avoiding scams
- Choosing products, apps, technology, and services that I can trust
- Keeping children safe online
- Responsible use of AI
- Keeping the internet is open and free
- Knowing how to spot misinformation
- Other (please specify)
With your help, together we can imagine and create the Internet we want. Thank you for being a part of this.
Always yours,
Nabiha Syed Executive Director Mozilla Foundation
Shame their AI question didn’t have a “my biggest concerns is companies chasing the AI buzzword with no tangible benefit”
right? mozilla, you gotta focus on making a good web browser right now. not a more gimmicky web browser
I think the offline language translation is a neat feature in a browser
I agree that’s basically what I out in the text box underneath the AI multi-select options. “We don’t want yet another annoying AI search feature or chatbot! We want a focus on useable features and security!”
Private, offline language translation is not “no tangible benefit”.
Neither is alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in searching the web. That’s a massive feature.
E: idk whether you’re down voting because you don’t want privacy or because you don’t like blind people lol
Fuck the blindies, being all uppity with their scepters and shit
I’m not anti-ai, but all signs point to the who thing stagnating, I don’t see what mozilla could contribute in the current climate.
Just make a better browser… you literally pioneered RUST
deleted by creator
Thankfully, development of Servo has been revived, and it’s now fully independent of Mozilla. I believe it’s now being stewarded by the Linux Foundation of Europe, with a lot of contributions from Igalia.
The result of the whole thing was project quantum. Firefox includes lots of Rust code. Servo was never intended to be a product, it always was a research platform.
Yup, that’s when I lost the remaining hope I had for the project.
I want nothing to do with AI, everything is like “I want transparency” I dont want them involved at all, pissing away money buzz words.
What do you want from mozilla? an open source privacy focused browser.
You’re free to send your data to google or deepl instead of using Firefox’s included AI translate. You know, privacy, no AI in the browser, choose one.
But their AI helps protect privacy? The main thing it’s currently used for is offline private translation that doesn’t send data to Google’s servers.
The other main AI feature they’re working on is AI-generated alt-text for untagged images, so that blind people can better use the web.
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
Helping blind people use computers is a good thing.
Private, offline translation is a good thing.
If they had called these features “machine learning” instead of “AI”, it would make zero function difference, but you wouldn’t be reacting in this manner.
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
They asked and we think they shouldn’t waste money on it and everything they do should be optional and not bundled by default. Why do you think we didn’t understand?
People have been asking for translation in Firefox for years, they add it in a way that works well and is completely private, and people cry about it.
It IS optional and it ISN’T bundled by default.
If anything, they’re a bit annoying to enable, because you currently have to go into the settings to look for it.
I don’t think privacy or usability for blind people is a waste.
Sure, those two are ok, I guess, so long as Firefox doesn’t download models before I try using them for the first time. However, I emphatically don’t want and wouldn’t use and would be miffed if any tl;dring AI plugins weren’t optional. Mind you, we’re only here discussing this because we were asked about it and now there’s people replying as if ours are ludicrously luddite opinions that stand in the way of progress and Mozilla’s success.
If everything is an optional component the onboarding process might get pretty overwhelming for the average user
Well, la di fucking dah. You’re telling me they have to bundle the solution to make people realize they have problems that fit. I’d just like a lean browser that understands Ublock Origin is its primary concern and focus because it’s its main advantage at the moment. Bundle that if you’re in a bundling mood.
The fact that there’s no option to express my anger over the environmental cost of AI is infuriating. There is no responsible or positive use of AI when it’s accelerating the destruction of our climate.
I see a textbox saying “What do you want to see from Mozilla in the future?” You could add it there, as justification for why you want them to focus less on itThere is a text box part way through, I included my more general thoughts there
(my comment was getting rambly)
you get a star
There’s lot of reasons to hate AI. Spreading misinformation about renewable energy isn’t one of them
What?
He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.
Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.
And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.
There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.
The audacity to direct you to a donations page after you fill out their survey 😂
My brother in Lemmy, how do you think they pay their engineers?
Would you rather them try and get revenue through advertising means? Because that’s what it sounds like, no decision is a decision.
At the moment they still get money from me. Don’t know how much longer though…
What if the whole survey is just a ploy for donations
Always has been.
They seem to have a foregone conclusion that AI is a positive thing, rather than something that should be eradicated like smallpox or syphilis.
“Responsible use of AI” could mean things like providing small offline models for client-side translation. They’re actually building that feature and the preview is already amazing.
IMO, there’s no such thing as responsible AI use. All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human. Even worse, there’s zero accountability; when an AI makes a mistake and gets people killed, no executives or programmers will ever face any criminal charges because the blame will be too diffuse.
There is no gray. Only black and white!
So who should be held accountable when (mis)use of AI results in a needless death? Or worse?
Let’s say a company creates an AI taxi that runs you over leaving you without legs. Who are you going to sue?
“Oh it’s grey, so I’ll have a dollar from each shareholder.” That doesn’t sound right to me.
Who’s getting killed because of the “translate page” button in my browser?
I hate AI as much as the next AI-sceptic but that argument is just nonsense. We have plenty of machinery and other company owned assets already that could injure a human being without a direct human intervention causing the injury. Every telephone pole rotting through and falling on someone would legally be a similar situation.
The “translate page” button in my browser is evil? Get a grip.
All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.
I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.
Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).
This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.
Actually, the AI assistant fad isn’t all bad.
HomeAssistant has an open souce assistant pipeline that integrates into the most flexible smart home software around. It is completely local and doesn’t rely on the cloud at all. Essentially it could make Alexa’s and google homes (that literally spy on you and send key phrases back to your built data collection profile) obsolete. That is a way not to have to rely on corporate bullshit privacy invasion to have a good smart home.
Indeed transcribing and translating (and preserving dying languages and being able to re-teach them) are 2 of the best consumer uses for AI. Then there is accelerating disease and climate research.
If these were the use cases that were pushed instead of fucking conversational assistants, replacements for customer support that only direct to existing incomplete docs, taking away artists’ jobs, and creating 1984 “you can’t trust your own eyes and ears” in real time, then AI would actually be very worthwhile.
There are valid uses for AI. It is much better at pattern recognition than people. Apply that to healthcare and it could be a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of conditions that doctors wouldn’t think to look for until more noticeable symptoms occur.
It already has been applied to healthcare, and nearly every other industry, and has been for more than a decade.
The current LLM hype is the only thing most people know of when they hear “AI”. Which is a shame.
Peak hype-based ignorance 🤣
Being this confident while also not knowing how AI has been in use for more than the last decade, and going off on a rant on AI mistakes when a defining feature of AI is to solve problems that classical programming cannot, but without guaranteed results, is cringe AF
Not just building it’s shipping by default. That is, language detection and code that displays a popup asking you whether you want to download the actual translation model is shipping by default. About twelve megs per model, so 24 for a language pair.
It’s because it is a positive thing. Just because awful businesses hijacked and abused it doesn’t mean it’s all bad. Mozilla is approaching it in a positive way imo.
And what, exactly, is positive about it, that has no associated negative outcomes?
Specific to generative AI, I think client side generation can be a good thing, such as sentiment analysis or better word suggestions/autocomplete.
A number of other helpful tasks have negative outcomes, but if someone is going to use it, then I prefer they use the version of the tech that minimizes those negative outcomes. Whether Mozilla should be focussing on building that is a different matter though
AI that isn’t generative AI has a lot of positive uses, but usually that’s not what these discussions are about
Interpreting MRI scans?
Translating language?
Object detection on assembly lines?
Object detection to sort recycling?
Identifying disease markers?
Classifying data?
…etc
Things that it’s been used for for ages now, and has become ubiquitous for.
I for one do know that and am not against AI religiously and have used it to great effect and STILL DON’T WANT TO DOWNLOAD IT WITH MY BROWSER. Just make it an addon.
What’s positive about Mozilla having private, offline language translation?
Gee I dunno. Maybe that you get to translate web pages without sending that data to Google?
What’s positive about Mozilla using image recognition to generate alt-text for images
Gee I dunno. Maybe blind people being able to browse the web better?
What’s the positive about Mozilla using AI to flag fake product reviews?
Gee I dunno. Maybe to stop people being scammed?
E: I’m assuming you downvoted because you hate privacy, blind people, not being able to scam people with fake reviews, or some combination of the above lol.
You’re going to upset a lot of chess players if you get rid of all AI.
I mean, generally, it is.
It’s just that the uneducated masses don’t realize that “AI” outside of today’s LLMs has been improving our technological life for well over a decade now.
And so abused and misused for just as long. LLms and the hype and slop is a relatively new thing, this is old, useful, technology.
“Eradicated” is literally impossible, entire swathes of industries can only operate at the levels of efficiency they have come to rely on because of specialized models. And have for ages now, long before the hype and slop started.
Not every model is an LLM 🤦
I filled it, but there’s no avenue there to express my complete disdain for AI and how shit it can make a product. Just make everything AI optional, don’t make me download data for shit I’ll never use.
I did the same thing. I just want a product or service that doesn’t leverage AI. Mozilla’s resources are better spent improving the web.
It’s opt-in already, in fact you have to go out of your way to do it. And it’s currently only used for offline, private language translation, to my knowledge.
That is a very good usecase considering the alternative is to send it to a Google translation server.
I feel like people need to actually read beyond the “Mozilla adds AI to Firefox” headlines.
Of all the things you could want from Firefox. Of all the possibilities.
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
This is why we can’t have nice things…
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Also this one is really tenuous to the point I’ll say fuck your interpretations of what I wrote. It should be: I don’t want ANY translation to inflate the browser. Publish them as a separate exe or a Firefox plugin. They bundle it because it’s a bunch of shit most people don’t need and would never seek /download.
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
That’s presumptuous, I’m perfectly aware of it, but I’m not downloading the grand majority of translation tools with my browser.
deleted by creator
You can submit the survey without checking any of the boxes on the AI question, just FYI.
gecko webview for android, better site isolation
Prolong your browser for as long as necessary and explore the possibility of using the internet without any web browsers. Firefox is a last stand of competition, and without choice there might as well not be browsers at all.
Is it wise to have such a complex everything-app with no end in sight? (more like, no end in site)
My dream for Mozilla is that it does not descend into a capitalist marionette full of silent information gathering and black-box AI widgets. If you’re going to do AI, I want it open, like training data open. Whitepaper open. I want to be able to trust the company and it’s projects and especially it’s browser.
Realistically, firefox will monetize advertising. But as long as they remain true to open source, we will have the forks to strip out the nasty bits. The normies will get less violated than elsewhere and people in the know will still have the dream browser.
This 500 million per year pay cut is going to hurt no matter what.
Nobody is going to upload this but this is the same scenario that had Brave screwing around with cryptocurrency and selling search engine results.
I asked them to support JPEGXL by default.
good set of questions while trying to be non biased on certain topics.
for me, topics about privacy and misinformation matter more than ai. i would like them to lean more on helping me identify ai generated text and deepfakes as far as ai is concerned.
i also liked that mozilla study about smart cars so more of that is nice.
Make and maintain the best browser. The end.
Besides the already sketchy AI thing, I wonder why they need to know gender & ethnicity.
Because that’s a typical demographics question for any survey worth it’s salt?
There’s nothing sketchy about their AI implementation.
Private, locally-run, offline language translation that doesn’t send data to Google translation servers is a good thing. I don’t see how that’s sketchy.
Or their alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in using the web. I don’t see how that’s sketchy at all.
deleted by creator
