@Tock @davidgerard @theorangetheme @theogrin (Quick interjection: I love that everybody cares about Firefox enough to be bothered. If we didn’t, we’d be ignoring it completely. Nobody is talking about Opera.)

I get all this. My worry is that everyone just turns their backs on Firefox and abandons it, it’ll just go away. And that leaves us with Chromium ONLY.

I think we need to find productive ways to get what we need and stand firm on that. But killing it is not good for the web ecosystem.

@davidgerard @firefoxwebdevs I appreciate the time and effort you put into this thoughtful response, emphasizing points that are an important part of the discussion.

@fwaggle @mcc @firefoxwebdevs I like this. There’s a joke here about bugs in code…

@mcc @firefoxwebdevs It is going to be very difficult to avoid any application being built today that doesn’t have some part of it “infected” by AI.

There are degrees of “codegen” as well… to what extent do you employ it? A scaffolded loop, autocompleted function call that gets the order of the parameters right?

Or draft out and deploy an entire application?

I think we have to be realistic about it but also call out the fools who are misusing it or thinking it makes them a real programmer.

@mcc @firefoxwebdevs It is a shame that we’ve come to having to ban the use of some tools.

I used an unfortunate word choice, despite an apropos meaning in this context: an idiot is an utterly foolish or senseless person. Programmers should know how to properly use the tools they have. That’s why I’m not all against AI codegen. In the right hands, a tool can create something beautiful and useful. In foolish hands, it can damage.

Learn your craft first. Then use tools properly to enhance it.

@mcc @firefoxwebdevs I would mostly agree with this if you added this at the end of your statement: …by an idiot programmer or one who didn’t grow up and learn to code properly during the decades before AI LLMs.

In reality, I don’t think either of us are going to get our way on this one.

@firefoxwebdevs I don’t think you can make any assumptions then without granular switches that let the user control every facet. In which case, this kill switch is probably less a binary checkbox and more a slider or a series of discrete options. And as a Firefox and Thunderbird user, we are used to lots of toggles and switches under the hood, so I’m fine with that kind of control.

@firefoxwebdevs But wait… what if the developers used AI to help develop the code in the browser itself? Does that mean AI kill switch purists should then rather not even use the product at all?

@firefoxwebdevs Hookay… then this is less about a local feature or data sharing and more about an overall “Made with AI” concern where nothing related to AI *at*all*ever* taints the user’s browser, in or out. In that case, if the user turns on the AI kill switch, it should totally kill anything having to do with AI for those who take that position.

That’s an issue with these polls — too much undisclosed nuance to be able to answer properly.

@firefoxwebdevs But if the ML/AI training work is processing on the device and not is shared off device, and it is in support of a feature like translating a page (which should be prompted/selectable) then what’s the issue? You can say no and nothing happens. Or you can say yes and the worse that happens is you chew up some local power on your laptop or PC. Or are you saying that even though the translation happens on the device, the RESULT of that training data is sent back out?

@firefoxwebdevs As worded, and if we can trust Mozilla, then the acceptable answer should be No for these reasons: ML is not AI, and on-device means nothing is sent out of the device. In exchange you get free translation. Win.

BUT… there’s the trust issue now.

And what we REALLY need is not an AI kill switch but more of a “data transfer/phone-home kill switch”, almost like a firewall, where we know the browser is not taking any data and sending it to a device we don’t control ourselves.