Oh my fucking god. I just right clicked a link to an article to open it in a new tab in Firefox and saw an option to “Ask an AI Chatbot (Z).” Fucking EW. There was thankfully an option to remove it from my context menu, but oh my fucking god, AI bros are so fucking desperate to adopt this tech en masse, I swear to god.
Let the fucking bubble burst, nobody fucking likes generative-AI and making it goddamn inescapable is not going to make us like it. Let it go the way of NFT and the metaverse like it goddamn deserves. If generative-AI was genuinely that fucking good, people would naturally adopt it like we did with computers. Companies did not have to work this hard to get people to adopt computers because their purpose and value was obvious.
And @mozilla, @firefox please for the love of god, stop adding AI features. I get you’re partially funded by Google, but grow a goddamn spine and listen to your users. People do not like these features and expect better from you. Firefox is supposed to be about privacy and generative-AI is NOT good for privacy (do I even need to mention Windows Recall?) You wanna be the alternative to Google so bad, yet you do the same scummy, disliked sh!t everyone hates Google for.
You sound like an old conservative bitching about the Internet in the 90s. Were you furious 10 years ago about the word “server”?
AI is not NFTs, the metaverse, or Windows Recall. It’s not a monolith. It cannot simply be reduced to “good” or “bad”. It is a marketing term applied to a natural progression of computing technology. It has pros and cons. It will become more power efficient over time. Some use cases will go away and we will find areas where it shines. Be angry at how Big Tech is abusing it, sure, but educate yourself about what it is or continue to splinter yourself culturally away from society.
Go ahead and do a google search. You’re free to. It’s wonderful. You can search for a specific product and it’ll spit out links to buy completely unrelated products. You can try to access basis info about a business and not find it. You can ask technical questions and not get answers. It’s all out there but will you see it? No. Why? Because fuck you, apparently.
You can ask a chatbot and get any of that info. There’s a small chance it’ll be wrong. But you can ask again. Or try google.
Do I love this situation? I fucking hate it. I’d rather have a functional search engine than ask a chatbot. But it IS the situation. If you don’t like it then don’t use it.
If you honestly believe that one of the most useful technologies ever invented is going to be abandoned because people don’t like it, or it’s been placed somewhere it maybe shouldn’t be, then I have a bridge to sell you.
I guess option 2, why stop now.