No, translations is not AI and everybody knows that, including Mozilla. Lumping translations in with the rest of the AI shit completely defeats the purpose of having the “AI off switch”.
Except it is. That’s why it gets turned off when you disable AI. It uses a small local model. Translations are one of the things LLMs are pretty good at.
I kind of get it since they need funding to escape Google’s boot and AI is a money printing machine at the moment but it all seems shortsighted and poorly done. If they added AI features slowly and with caution I’d be happier but they’re buying into the “GAMBLE IT ALL ON POORLY CONCEIVED AI FEATURES NOBODY ASKED FOR” hype train which is just going to be a disaster
I’ve been pretty happy with the Zen Browser fork of Firefox (minus the fact that the lead dev seems to be a bit of an opinionated dick but it works well anyway)
RetroFed
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I switched to Waterfox last week
Welcome 🤝
At least there’s an AI off switch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, translations is not AI and everybody knows that, including Mozilla. Lumping translations in with the rest of the AI shit completely defeats the purpose of having the “AI off switch”.
Except it is. That’s why it gets turned off when you disable AI. It uses a small local model. Translations are one of the things LLMs are pretty good at.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-ai-controls#%3A%7E%3Atext=Translations%3A+When+you+browse+the+web+in+Firefox%2C+we+use+generative+AI+to+translate+pages+into+your+preferred+language+seamlessly.
You can enable translations while still keeping the rest of AI features disabled. Individual options override the global switch
I kind of get it since they need funding to escape Google’s boot and AI is a money printing machine at the moment but it all seems shortsighted and poorly done. If they added AI features slowly and with caution I’d be happier but they’re buying into the “GAMBLE IT ALL ON POORLY CONCEIVED AI FEATURES NOBODY ASKED FOR” hype train which is just going to be a disaster
I’ve been pretty happy with the Zen Browser fork of Firefox (minus the fact that the lead dev seems to be a bit of an opinionated dick but it works well anyway)