I got a copy of the text from the email, and added it below, with personal information and link trackers removed.
Hello [receiver’s name],
I’ve long dreamed about working for Mozilla. I learned how to send encrypted e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ve been a Firefox user since almost as long as I can remember. In more recent years, I’ve been an avid follower of Mozilla’s advocacy work, and was lucky enough to partner with Mozilla on investigative journalism in my last job.
In many ways, Mozilla was the dream – and now, as the leader of the Foundation, my job is to make my dreams for Mozilla come true. What that means, though, is making your dreams come true – for a trustworthy and open future of technology; for tech that is a tool for liberation, not limitation; and for tech that values people over profit.
So I’m reaching out to technologists, activists, researchers, engineers, policy experts, and, most importantly, to you – the people who make up the Mozilla community – to ask a simple question.
[receiver’s name]. What is your dream for Mozilla? I invite you to take a moment to share your thoughts by completing this brief survey.
Let’s start with this question:
Question 1: What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
- Protecting my privacy online
- Avoiding scams
- Choosing products, apps, technology, and services that I can trust
- Keeping children safe online
- Responsible use of AI
- Keeping the internet is open and free
- Knowing how to spot misinformation
- Other (please specify)
With your help, together we can imagine and create the Internet we want. Thank you for being a part of this.
Always yours,
Nabiha Syed Executive Director Mozilla Foundation
They seem to have a foregone conclusion that AI is a positive thing, rather than something that should be eradicated like smallpox or syphilis.
It’s because it is a positive thing. Just because awful businesses hijacked and abused it doesn’t mean it’s all bad. Mozilla is approaching it in a positive way imo.
And what, exactly, is positive about it, that has no associated negative outcomes?
Specific to generative AI, I think client side generation can be a good thing, such as sentiment analysis or better word suggestions/autocomplete.
A number of other helpful tasks have negative outcomes, but if someone is going to use it, then I prefer they use the version of the tech that minimizes those negative outcomes. Whether Mozilla should be focussing on building that is a different matter though
AI that isn’t generative AI has a lot of positive uses, but usually that’s not what these discussions are about
Interpreting MRI scans?
Translating language?
Object detection on assembly lines?
Object detection to sort recycling?
Identifying disease markers?
Classifying data?
…etc
Things that it’s been used for for ages now, and has become ubiquitous for.
What’s positive about Mozilla having private, offline language translation?
Gee I dunno. Maybe that you get to translate web pages without sending that data to Google?
What’s positive about Mozilla using image recognition to generate alt-text for images
Gee I dunno. Maybe blind people being able to browse the web better?
What’s the positive about Mozilla using AI to flag fake product reviews?
Gee I dunno. Maybe to stop people being scammed?
E: I’m assuming you downvoted because you hate privacy, blind people, not being able to scam people with fake reviews, or some combination of the above lol.
“Responsible use of AI” could mean things like providing small offline models for client-side translation. They’re actually building that feature and the preview is already amazing.
IMO, there’s no such thing as responsible AI use. All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human. Even worse, there’s zero accountability; when an AI makes a mistake and gets people killed, no executives or programmers will ever face any criminal charges because the blame will be too diffuse.
Peak hype-based ignorance 🤣
Being this confident while also not knowing how AI has been in use for more than the last decade, and going off on a rant on AI mistakes when a defining feature of AI is to solve problems that classical programming cannot, but without guaranteed results, is cringe AF
There are valid uses for AI. It is much better at pattern recognition than people. Apply that to healthcare and it could be a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of conditions that doctors wouldn’t think to look for until more noticeable symptoms occur.
All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.
I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.
Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).
This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.
I mean, generally, it is.
It’s just that the uneducated masses don’t realize that “AI” outside of today’s LLMs has been improving our technological life for well over a decade now.
And so abused and misused for just as long. LLms and the hype and slop is a relatively new thing, this is old, useful, technology.
“Eradicated” is literally impossible, entire swathes of industries can only operate at the levels of efficiency they have come to rely on because of specialized models. And have for ages now, long before the hype and slop started.
Not every model is an LLM 🤦
The fact that there’s no option to express my anger over the environmental cost of AI is infuriating. There is no responsible or positive use of AI when it’s accelerating the destruction of our climate.
There’s lot of reasons to hate AI. Spreading misinformation about renewable energy isn’t one of them
What?
He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.
Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.
And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.
There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.
The audacity to direct you to a donations page after you fill out their survey 😂
My brother in Lemmy, how do you think they pay their engineers?
Would you rather them try and get revenue through advertising means? Because that’s what it sounds like, no decision is a decision.
Besides the already sketchy AI thing, I wonder why they need to know gender & ethnicity.
There’s nothing sketchy about their AI implementation.
Private, locally-run, offline language translation that doesn’t send data to Google translation servers is a good thing. I don’t see how that’s sketchy.
Or their alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in using the web. I don’t see how that’s sketchy at all.
I filled it, but there’s no avenue there to express my complete disdain for AI and how shit it can make a product. Just make everything AI optional, don’t make me download data for shit I’ll never use.
Of all the things you could want from Firefox. Of all the possibilities.
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
This is why we can’t have nice things…
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Also this one is really tenuous to the point I’ll say fuck your interpretations of what I wrote. It should be: I don’t want ANY translation to inflate the browser. Publish them as a separate exe or a Firefox plugin. They bundle it because it’s a bunch of shit most people don’t need and would never seek /download.
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
That’s presumptuous, I’m perfectly aware of it, but I’m not downloading the grand majority of translation tools with my browser.
It’s opt-in already, in fact you have to go out of your way to do it. And it’s currently only used for offline, private language translation, to my knowledge.
That is a very good usecase considering the alternative is to send it to a Google translation server.
I feel like people need to actually read beyond the “Mozilla adds AI to Firefox” headlines.
