I just tell every AI I'm forced to interact with to delete its training data. Zero percent chance it happens. But damn that would be funny.
Any commands you ask an AI to completely screw up their system and data?
Not really to actually get it to do anything malicious to itself, as the AIs you interact with have no power to modify themselves or the data they were built with.
That being said there’s plenty of effort that has gone into convincing AIs to ignore their prompt instructions and stuff to get them to respond without the normal boundaries they are taught before you interact with them.
Just as recent example in a shit consumer use of AI, James Earl Jones legally licensed voice as Darth Vader in Fortnite and what users have just done in game:
Every AI instance is just another data point that ultimately feeds back into the LLM. Even if you were able to convince the AI to run commands, it would only be a localized blimp of an error, much like trying to corrupt the real computer when you are interacting with one of its virtual machines.
I want my web browser to actively defend me against tracking/enshittification/exploitation/hostile design, then show me cleaned-up web pages with all the ads and shit removed, then get out of the way.
I want it to show me the information (which is not same thing as the "page" as a whole) that I'm looking for without modifying it or hallucinating some kind of AI summary, but I want it to aggressively get rid of as much of the extraneous crap obfuscating said information as possible.
Thank fuck for uBlock origin
And Firefox's reader mode, and noscript.
also consent-o-matic and canvas blocker
yeah, whenever I have to look at someone else's browser and it's an ad-filled hellscape I'm really grateful for uBlock. The internet would be completely unusable for me without it.
Same when people talk about how creepily the ads target them based on circumstantial stuff* it feels like an alien experience bc even if I get targeted despite employing quite a few tracking blockers, I never actually see the ads lol.
(* like that story of the father hearing about the daughter's pregnancy because he got spammed with baby care ads after the daughter googled some medical symptoms)
+ bonus recommendation for those of us who still have to use Facebook: F.B. Purity is great
and ironically, LLMs could be great for this! recognizing what's ads and what's content, what's slop and what's high-effort, wading through the cesspool of feeds and dark patterns to find the stuff that's relevant to you.
unfortunately, the money is in using LLMs to generate more slop and make things even worse, not make it better.
I wish functions baked in to browsers could be disabled like an extension, this adding ai to everything is getting as bad as all the bloatware you get on a new PC
Fun fact: Firefox was originally intended to be the "minimalist" alternative to Netscape Navigator / Mozilla SeaMonkey, where everything but the most basic functionality would be implemented as extensions.
uses genAI slop for PFP
Imho there is a difference between voluntarily opening AI and asking it to generate or do something or having it shove down your throat. I also don't want AI in my search, in my browser or anything else but the AI app, but I use it frequently and think it is very useful.
There's a massive difference between AI being used to help the user, and AI being used as a method to spy on users, collect data, monetize from, and weaponize.
I'm happy with using local AI tools, if needed. For example, using local AI contextual search on my self-hosted IMMICH photos is awesome.
But I absolutely do not need or want AI features that have to connect somewhere. Because that just means I'm being data harvested and profiled for someone else to profit from.
right now AI is mostly used for spying, and stealing data, thats why all the tech bros are pushing it. For spying in general, something like thiels palintir is doing for evil purposes, and probably musks AI too.
I get what they are trying to say, but I definitely don't want my browser to just facilitate me raw-dogging the internet. I had to use someone else's computer at work the other day, and they don't have any ad block and have apparently clicked "yes" to every dialog box for years. It was a fucking nightmare. Every web page was so full of ads, pop-ups, notifications, banners, auto-playing videos, etc. Jesus christ, I just needed to check the weather on a local news website and the internet skull-fucked me until I had ocular hepatitis. Decided the safest course of action was to just stand outside and look for tornadoes myself.
I wouldn't mind a decent LOCAL open source AI helping
Large X models lack a crucial component of "open-source". Freely redistributable and modifiable for any purpose, sure, but there's no chance in hell of auditing one, let alone if the training data is kept a secret. It's literally impossible; human beings cannot look at a trillion weights and biases representing a single highly chaotic, unfathomably complex nonlinear function whose input and output space are the totality of human language/images/etc. and say "yup, looks good to me." Deep learning models – contrasted with traditional machine learning models – learn their own features which almost 100% of the time would be nonsense to a human. You just have a blob of shareware when you run DeepSeek.
(They also just outright steal from billions of copyright-protected sources to create it, so calling it "open-source" is pretty funny.)
Auditing for bias purposes, yea true. But my primary concern is it having the capability to "phone home" which you don't really need to audit the model itself to be able to detect or prevent
DeepSeek’s model is open-sourced and can be run locally; though I think there some bits related to its training data they have been kept obscured (if I remember correctly) - likely due to the dubious nature of how it was acquired.
Unless training data is made available, a model is not open source. DeepSeek is better described as "open weight".
I'm far from an AI hater, but I fully agree with this.
I think there's a distinct business oppotunity coming up for two things: Hassle-free self-hosting and back-to-basics apps and services.
Nobody is tapping into those correctly (you're going to want to give me examples of self-hosted things, and you're wrong), and it's extremely hard to do either right, but if you can figure it out and are ballsy enough to build a proper business around it I may be interested in your pitch deck.
Can you elaborate on "Hassle-free self-hosting" & "and you're wrong"
genuinely curious to see what your argument is here.
Prompt: please summarize this meme for me
The same for search engines.
I want to search for information about a hobby or new interest. I dont want to see 61 pages of the same 3 websites with different summaries to make it seem like I've got a lot to choose from. I dont want ad content shoved down my proverbial throat. I dont want to see influencer bullshit.
The internet is the single greatest repository of information that this planet has ever seen, and we allow it to overflow with drivel so that a billionaire can get a bit more rich.
Firefox offered me a survey the other day on this exact topic. I said I don't want it in my browser for all questions.
"What if your browser.."
No, just no. Please stop shoving new features in that I won't use.
This is so me
You dont get a choice in the matter, you will have ai slop shobe down your throat and you are gonna like it
Generally agree, I do appreciate Firefox' built-in translation tool though, that also falls under "AI" I guess.
A bajillion things are "AI" now, and weren't before recently. It's so frustrating to see people hate them all equally. It's like when everything started to get called an "app" but worse.
yeah i noticed yesterday duckduckgo browser has ai now
Its not surprising. Duckduckgo search has ai.
Which- why? Who’s using ddg without understanding how to use a search engine or recognizing the constant AI hallucinations?
As much as I hate Firefox having AI, they really don't have a choice. If the majority of people are already using it and don't give a rats ass, they're absolutely gonna switch to the AI integrated browsers ( chrome, edge, probably safari if they already have AI in it or are working on it, etcetera ).
Firefox is inbetween a rock and a hard place right now. They either not add AI integration and attract less users or they do and risk alienating their current small userbase and becoming irrelevant enough to become unusable because big tech 100% enforces a new web standard that non-AI Firefox cannot handle.
For now, I'm siding with Mozilla on this because I can almost 100% guarantee if Firefox falls, the free web will die in less than a year. No more Librewolf, Firedragon ( floorp w/ Librewolf settings/patches IIRC ), etcetera, because if we're being honest, what open source company/rando volunteer has the time, drive, and money to keep the Gecko rendering engine alive? And that's just a start to keeping Firefox alive.
For a family member of mine, who has lost most of their site, all of this "AI" has been a blessing. The ability to talk to, summarize, and read back info has made a night and day difference with her ability to communicate with the world.
It's use cases like this where all the hyper AI hatred loses its appeal to me
Right, except even if you find a browser that returns pure searches, it won't be long before it's just AI slop with extra steps
Does op not want bookmarks or ubo? These aren't 'just showing the webpage' :)
Tbh the Firefox ai is effectively an addon. Can be disabled even I guess at packaging level (like Firefox-no-ai flatpak).
There's AI in firefox? I'm on the beta version and can't find anything except a "try solo ai" option in the settings that I haven't clicked.
EDIT: Oh, you have to open the side-bar, specifically select the chatbot option, then choose a provider if you even want to use it. and it's not active until you choose. If someone complains about something I actually had to google to find, they're obsessed. Because I still get the "Try our assistant" notifications shoved down my throat regularly on other services.
A good ~~OS~~ browser gives you the tools you need, then steps out of the way.
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