Firefox

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With introduction of even more AI services to Firefox I wanted to express that to me it does seem like Firefox is missing with development of features. This sentiment is echoed by a lot of people in my social bubble of technologists, ethicists and other people with same priorities as what one could think are values which Firefox was built on.

Those concerns are in my opinion very valid. The machine learning models have shown to be unreliable - just some of the recent examples from AI products made by large corporations: pointing users to eat pizza with glue, providing false information about just about anything. There are a number of ethical issues yet to be resolved with usage of AI, from its intense usage of computing resources that adds up to electric grid demands. Through privacy and possible copyright violations of datasets that power the models. To an entire bag of other issues monitored by excellent resources such as AIAAIC repository. 

AI/Machine learning is an amazing field with many likely applications, and yet, its recent rise to fame is characterized by failures and issues in many implementations. Personally I often don't even see whether the application of AI is truthfully necessary, in many cases a human would do a more trustworthy and fast task of information gathering than a large machine learning model.

When we compare current state of "AI", does it reflect what Firefox stands for? Does it reflect Mozilla's principals?

Let's compare.

• Principle 2
  The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.

LLMs are known for being a black box. Depending on our definition of "open and accessible", LLMs can be a very free resource or a completely inaccessible black box of math.

• Principle 4
  Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.

It's clear that LLMs pose a privacy risk to Internet users. LLMs pose risk in at least two ways - because the data they are trained on sometimes contains private information due to negligent training process. In this case users of a learned model can possibly access private information. The second risk is of course usage of 3rd party services that may use information to infringe on privacy of users. While Mozilla in blog assures that "we are committed to following the principles of user choice, agency, and privacy as we bring AI-powered enhancements to Firefox", it's unclear how supporting such services as "ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral" helps protect Firefox user privacy. Giving users choice should not compromise their safety and privacy.

• Principle 10
  Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

In my opinion in the process of designing AI functionalities on top of Firefox there was no evaluation on how those functionalities can benefit the public. There are a number of issues as mentioned above with the LLMs, they can be dangerous and work in detriment to users. Investing and supporting in technology of this type may lead to terrible consequences with little actual benefit.

In addition Mozilla claims:

• We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts.

I argue that AI models are the opposite to that. AI output is not verifiable. They are working against sharing knowledge by making seemingly accurate information that turn out to be false.

I ask Mozilla to reevaluate impact of AI considering all of those points. I ask on behalf of myself as well as many users that I see on Fediverse being greatly worried and frustrated with AI changes added on top of Firefox. There is certainly a lot of potential greatness that could be done with AI, but those steps must be taken responsibly.