Mozilla right now.

@CosmicHorror @wizzwizz4 @coldfish @davidrevoy 11 days. He had donated money to the campaign for Prop 8, a 2008 California referendum to ban same-sex marriage https://www.kqed.org/news/131545/mozilla-ceo-resigns-over-donation-to-prop-8-campaign

@davidrevoy Pretty sure they know they're alienating their core users, hoping to get a larger group of less privacy-savvy users.

@elgregor @davidrevoy Firefox offline translation is great. But it is absolutely not what they are marketing as "AI". At no point in time they advertised this as AI. So yeah, it's great, and it's not what they mean by adding AI. They have been advertising "ethical AI" since almost 10 years, and there zero thing to show except 35 millions spent on proprietary AI startups.

@adra Thank you!

To be fair, I could paint this one quickly because I only painted the fox and the parrot over a scene that I had already painted for Reddit when they had their API change controversy back in June 2023. The artwork is hosted somewhere in this directory: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/artworks/misc.html

@bohwaz @davidrevoy Many people (correctly) refer to this kind of features as "AI" and so do various news outlets. I have seen multiple people upset at local models and asking how to delete them. I have seen people advertise Firefox derivatives that remove the local models with the lack of those models described as a feature. I believe this mostly stems from misinformation and this is why I will keep explaining that "AI" is a very broad term that includes good things as well as bad things.

@julienw
Seeing how the AI crap already in Firefox is enabled by default and has to be disabled in about:config, no, it does not reduce my concern.
Start with opt-in for the already integrated AI crap and an easy way to disable it.

@pmiossec @Kampfdiestel @Gynux @davidrevoy

@davidrevoy very accurate.

@davidrevoy
Brilliant

@coldfish @davidrevoy
https://mastodon.social/@utf_7/115742616343666373

@davidrevoy

I love this. One question, is the bird a mascot for something or just a robot bird?

@davidrevoy @jargoggles This is so accurate

@davidrevoy This looks so beautiful for commentary on tech!

@davidrevoy sorry how you mean ?

@davidrevoy @adra

I think I found it - https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/misc__2023-06-12_Shhhrrrr-Shrrr-Shrrrr_by-David-Revoy.html

@resplendent606 the bird represents AI/LLM in all of the recent drawings ("stochastic parrots")

@ligaturerecords

That is so clever!

@Zekovski
No they didn't roll back their TOS change:

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/16054

@Johns_priv @OndrejZizka

@davidrevoy The fact that they're already sawing. Yep, that's the Mozilla I know and tolerate

@CyberPunker
No cloud-based AI is enabled by default as far as I understood. Yes there are menu options but until they're configured nothing happens. And even when configured that's not working automatically but following a specific user action.

A global switch is in the making too, the plan is to ship it in February.

@pmiossec @Kampfdiestel @Gynux @davidrevoy

@davidrevoy I'm not sure so far. ML has valid applications, and so far what Mozilla has brought to the table seems very reasonable to me. Most important thing for me is that everything is local and privacy friendly. And the features they have are very reasonable: An alt-text generation model makes a lot of sense for people to whom alt-texts matter. And local translation of websites also sounds like a really nice feature. As far as I see such features will make the web more accessible with better privacy.

For me the most important things are:

1. ML should be local and not send arbitrary data to shady third party services
2. ML should be build to only affect performance when you actually need it
3. ML should provide specific tools, not general purpose blackboxes

Also
4. ML should be trained in a responisble way, which means:
1. Responsible source of training data
2. Resource use of training should be justified by the benefit of the functionality

I remember the time when ML was mosty an exciting University thing, where results were shared, and not some big corporation BS. I am not against going back in that direction.

But you know, digiKam has been using public models for facial recognition and matching for years now. And I don't think anything bad came from it.

I am currently in the position of saying: Wait and see what mozilla does. And if it turns out the wrong way, there are forks. That's the beauty of open source.