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Title: Could Firefox Be the Browser That Protects the Privacy of AI Users?

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/15/2242...

Tech entrepreneur/blogger Anil Dash has been critical of AI browsers like
ChatGPT Atlas. (He's written that Atlas "substitutes its own AI-generated
content for the web, but it looks like it's showing you the web," while its
prompt-based/command-line interface resembles a clunky text adventure, and
it's true purpose seems to be ingesting more training data.) And at the
Mozilla Festival in Spain, "Virtually everyone shared some version of what
I'd articulated as the majority view on AI, which is approximately that LLMs
can be interesting as a technology, but that Big Tech, and especially Big AI,
are decidedly awful and people are very motivated to stop them from
committing their worst harms upon the vulnerable." But... Another reality
that people were a little more quiet in acknowledging, and sometimes
reluctant to engage with out loud, is the reality that hundreds of millions
of people are using the major AI tools every day... I don't know why today's
Firefox users, even if they're the most rabid anti-AI zealots in the world,
don't say, "well, even if I hate AI, I want to make sure Firefox is good at
protecting the privacy of AI users so I can recommend it to my friends and
family who use AI"... My personal wishlist would be pretty simple: * Just
give people the "shut off all AI features" button. It's a tiny percentage of
people who want it, but they're never going to shut up about it, and they're
convinced they're the whole world and they can't distinguish between being
mad at big companies and being mad at a technology so give them a toggle
switch and write up a blog post explaining how extraordinarily expensive it
is to maintain a configuration option over the lifespan of a global product.
* Market Firefox as "The best AI browser for people who hate Big AI". Regular
users have no idea how creepy the Big AI companies are - they've just heard
their local news talk about how AI is the inevitable future. If Mozilla can
warn me how to protect my privacy from ChatGPT, then it can also mention that
ChatGPT tells children how to self-harm, and should be aggressive in engaging
with the community on how to build tools that help mitigate those kinds of
harms - how do we catalyze that innovation? * Remind people that there isn't
"a Firefox" - everyone is Firefox. Whether it's Zen, or your custom build of
Firefox with your favorite extensions and skins, it's all part of the same
story. Got a local LLM that runs entirely as a Firefox extension? Great! That
should be one of the many Firefoxes, too. Right now, so much of the drama and
heightened emotions and tension are coming from people's (well... dudes'
egos about there being One True Firefox, and wanting to be the one who
controls what's in that version, as an expression of one set of values. This
isn't some blood-feud fork, there can just be a lot of different choices for
different situations. Make it all work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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