Usually, I pride myself in having nuanced opinions. When generative AI was gaining ground and hype, and receiving pushback mainly from artists, I was sceptical, but optimistic. "Maybe this technology can be useful", I thought, not eager to discard a tool only because people could use it badly.

Now, I can say that I hate what "AI" has become and that I hope that this bubble bursts before it can grow any larger. Not only it's yet another huge useless drain for energy and water, but it's actively fucking up yet another project that I care about. I get that Firefox wants to stay competitive, but it's the worst watching it divert its limited resources towards useless AI and not to other much more needed areas.

[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Mozilla also announced some time ago that they were getting into the ad business. All of this really shows that at the end of the day they're just another company, you don't see many free software developers go ”noooo we have to put ads and AI into our Linux distro!”.

[–] Emanuel@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, I've been following it's enshittification for some time, but idk, this AI stuff really struck a nerve with me. With ads, I can somewhat understand that they want to make their business more sustainable, which sucks for the end user, but at least it provides a way for Firefox not to die and we could leave the work to its numerous forks to not be shit. But the AI stuff is really nonsense, not useful at all, just a way for the company to follow the hype of the AI bubble, instead of making itself sustainable.

I can only hope that turning off the AI stuff at a code level is something sustainable and easy. I've used Librewolf for some time now and it sucks knowing that this will only add work for the project to remove Mozilla's new shiny toy from the code.

Edit: maybe I'm just coping is all lol