“I don’t want AI”

“Actually you do though, but if you don’t then you’re an out of touch pretentious old weirdo and should just shut the fuck up”

Regular, non-expert internet users find it fun, or even amusing, to play gacha games. And yet the sentiment about a potential new gacha game panel built into Firefox has been overwhelmingly negative. While sophisticated gamer aesthetes find those creations gauche or even offensive, other cultures find them perfectly addictive.

Most of the people that see gacha games as a valuable use of their time on this earth belong to demographics that are dismissed by all you internet weirdos. It's an incredibly mainstream experience now. Regular people have no problem collecting trading cards, making the numbers go up, and spending money on in-game purchases. If Firefox wants to keep up with the times it needs a built-in gacha game so that it can protect the privacy of all the billions of people who will see it and understand that Firefox is the web browser and gacha game platform made for them.

If Henry Ford had given his users what they wanted, he would have built a faster horse.

Users want AI right now because a lot of people have spent a lot of money to convince them they want it. A few years ago, they wanted crypto and VR; a few more years from now, they'll want something else. We're already seeing evidence that the current AI boom is an unsustainable bubble. Will "hundreds of millions of users" still be using ChatGPT after OpenAI's investors get tired of losing billions of dollars every year, and decide it's time to start squeezing their customers for more cash?

This kind of trend-chasing is what happens when the people in charge have no real principles or vision underlying their actions. Firefox didn't beat Internet Explorer by following the crowd; it won by delivering a product that was better, and doing things nobody else had done before (like tabs). In order to do that, the people making it had to have a strong vision of what a "better" browser would look like.

How about making it a nice plugin? Could it be something that is optional and not hard to disable? Or is that too much to ask?

AI is the new bit of crap you now have to disable when visiting family. new apple device? disable in settings, disable in firefox, disable in duckduckgo. i see the benefit of ML in sciences but for gen consumers it’s just more personal data collection for sale so it can fuck right off

I spent much of the last week having the distinct honor of serving as MC at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona

Thanks for telling me you work for Mozilla, this instantly invalidates the rest of your Mozilla praise.

because there’s not a single documented use case for ai that is worth the destruction of the planet.