There you go, complaint defused

This right here. It's one of those situations where always asking the company to "Just listen to your users, ez, lol!" results in something that, surprisingly, quite a few people dislike.

Because yes, I'd say Most People™️ actively like AI-generated stuff, and of course there are valid use cases (like summarizing text and video content, the latter even helping with accessibility). But this in turn means that if a company listens to user input, they will shove AI into their products even if they would otherwise not be looking at doing it.

Yea, the uncreative shitstains who can make nothing on their own because they do not understand the first thing about hard work or art.

I am not that person but I use AI to figure out mostly computer issues that I have troubles to Google for.

I guess Google got so fucked up that even adding reddit to a prompt doesn't yeld a good result. And if you didn't add "reddit", results are all over the place and you still fail to find an answer. Fuck quora, who dafuck uses quora? Never saw a good answer there like ever.

And then there is chatgp that gives you options and so far it's been quite on point at least for me.

My guess would be it is general Google entshittification rather than superiority of LLMs. People want answers for their questions and Google is failing to provide any good info for past 5 years.

Yeah this is a feature we have because mozilla listens to their users.

This is tough to swallow for most of us - I hate this crap except for a minority of ultra-narrow use cases - but the general population of users loves AI. They want more of it.

This might shock you but Firefox is trying to appeal to people who are not already firefox users.

No they aren't. They are trying to appeal to investors and advertisers.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/advertising/index-exchange-partnership/

This might shock you but Firefox is trying to appeal to people who are not already firefox users.

Fuck them if they want the opposite of what firefox users want. Stop fucking chasing whoever isn't already on board with your current offering by fucking over your current users.

@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.

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.

@pennomi Yeah... I highly doubt the models featured with this, well, feature are those kinds of models. The vast, vast majority of users don't use those kinds of models.

@jahtnamas Doing that now, thanks!

Ironfox is similar

I have the ddg ai for on demand. But I remember the good old days when it would still provide you and answer summary box but without using generative AI

@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.