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.
@null_dot If all of the not Firefox users are AI-shills, then I don’t think we’re missing much from excluding them.
And what value? Wasting a load of water just for the chatbot to tell you that “strawberry” has 2 r’s in it? There is nothing generative-AI can do that other tech can’t do better and costing far less resources.
The “value” of generative-AI outside of highly niche scenarios is an illusion. For example, people think generative-AI in the workplace improves productivity when it actually does the opposite: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2025/10/02/ai-workslop-could-be-the-biggest-threat-to-productivity/
This is a good quote from that article: “A recent MIT Media Lab report found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their AI investments. Workslop helps explain why. When employees use AI to create low-effort output that shifts the burden downstream, any productivity gains are lost.”
Generative-AI has also actively made search engines worse, especially with their “summaries” containing significant errors about 50% of the time: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko
And I can go on and on. There is an entire laundry list why generative is just… not it, and whatever “value” people get from these can be gotten elsewhere, usually in higher quality and more ethically than relying on this tech.
Another shocker for you… mozilla isn’t viable with it’s current user base.
Idiots love AI chat bots, and there are plenty of idiots around.
@null_dot Even if that were true, that doesn’t consider the fact that generative-AI is a money black hole and literally the only company type profiting from this bubble are ones like Nvidia that are producing the graphics cards these models use. Generative-AI is not and will not be profitable; Mozilla is losing money by shilling this tech.
So even if you do attract a high volume of users by shoving in generative-AI (which I DOUBT), I doubt that would offset the money burning from running these models. It’s not a smart business move, either for users who despise the tech or users who love it. It’s a lose-lose.
Sorry, this is objectively false.
Gen AI is not presently profitable due to the rate of innovation. Developing a new inference model needs a lot of cash for salaries. Populating that new model needs a lot of compute.
Once you have the model, the cost to query it is minimal. You can literally buy a $500 graphics card and download a model and have it perform useful tasks.
The difficulty is, if it costs you $n billion to develop whatever model today, and it’s obsolete in 1 year, then thats a $n billion hit to your profitability this year. If innovation slowed down so maybe a model is still competitive after 10 years, then your costs have reduced by 90%.
There’s loads of things to dislike about AI, but the profitability thing is borne of misunderstanding on your part.
The arguments against AI you’re looking for are:
I would take issue with your implicit suggestion that humanity becoming slaves to AI would be fine if the machines doing it weren’t under the direct central control of their elite owners. The gradual replacement of human thinking with rapid low-cost mediocre pseudo-thought is a problem for more than just the worlds of media and art, no matter who’s nominally the owner of the process.
No, we’re not going to be slaves to a general AI, but it will grant unlimited power to whoever controls it.
There’s a large ecosystem of “open” models available to download and develop with. Sadly IMO this open movement is too small and too slow to assail the likes of openAI, but it’s something.
An open model available to everyone doesn’t concentrate power.
What I’m thinking of depends more on the training methods and data used. But I guess it’s too early to say much about what strong AI would be like, we’re not really close to it yet.
I mean some of it might turn out to be “profitable” in the narrow sense of earning financial returns for somebody, but that does not mean it will be a profitable endeavour for humanity in general.