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.
@deadbeef79000 You… you know these things can make up their sources, right? LLMs are notorious for making sh!t up, and it’s gotten worse in later models with seemingly little the companies running this tech can do because it’s more of a feature than a bug of LLMs.
They weren’t made to be search engines, they’re not, they’re as I said, probabilistic mimicry machines. When you use it like a search engine, you’re only querying its database of scraped stuff with a good chance it’ll pull something out of its ass to try and give you the answer you want to hear, not actually searching the internet. These models aren’t built to be accurate, they’re built to be plausible. They generate what the algorithm deems what you want to hear, not the truth.
So not only are you using a machine as a search engine that was not built to be one and can generate random bullsh!t, you’re also consuming a lot more energy and power to do so.
The only reason people are trying to use LLMs is as you said, to bypass Google’s deterioration (or at least one of its many factors of deterioration), which is an issue that’s only cropped up in the last few years. If Google didn’t enshittify, we wouldn’t be in this mess, and using LLMs is not going to fix that, especially as these LLMs inevitably enshittify themselves since LLMs are super unprofitable.
Yes, it means I can go to the sources.
Or at least, the overview is useful for finding terms to refine the search.
I’m ignoring the rest of your wall of text, because you’re first sentence was condescending.