@RAOF

So Mozilla recently announced their new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo. Just before the Holiday break. They launched this on the back of their Summary Portfolio Strategy back in November.

There's a key line in the document:

MoCo (and Mozilla) still depend on search for ~85% of revenue.

We know that business line is dying, so they clearly need something new here. And they're trying to do something to keep the ship moving here. This decision isn't just Anthony's decision, there is clear board involvement here, there are lots of people in agreement on how to change direction on this ship.

So let's pick different people. Let's say you get to be in charge. You RA0F are the new board and CEO.

What do you do instead?

@davidgerard @RAOF If your core belief is that Mozilla is failing to serve at the benefit of its members, then what are you even doing on this thread? You just hoping to harass the Dev account until they block you out of spite?

What evidence could any of us provide that would change your mind and cause you to become a Mozilla booster instead?

@davidgerard

Let's assume you're correct.
People only care about AI slop.

Why is Firefox even running this survey? Like who cares? Translations aren't "AI slop", they don't need to be covered by the "AI Kill Switch"... why are they even asking this question?

Now take that assumption and read the rest of the comments. From what I'm reading, people care about more than just the AI slop. People are asking questions about the models being used for ML systems, systems that are incapable of generating AI slop.

So we're at a weird spot here. You believe that people care only about AI slop. Firefox obviously believes that people care about more than that, because they're running this survey. And people responding are asking questions that also indicate they care about more than AI slop.

So how do we square this?
What do you think is a better outcome for Firefox and the community?

@firefoxwebdevs hey team, I'm happy that you're doing this, but I think you're caught in a really bad loop.

There is a significant Community backlash against a very specific tool, the LLM. Often just "the chatbot LLM". But that tool has become so ubiquitous, that it has become known as "the AI". For some people, anything that looks like AI might as well be Skynet.

People are spiraling, they're questioning not just LLMs, but anything that looks like it could be non-deterministic probabilistic code.

And look, I know that you run Common Voice, I'm a contributor. But we're not at the point where people are going to question even products that fall out of that project.

Little mini surveys like this are not going to quell any of that backlash.

I think we're at the spot where talking more broadly about where Mozilla uses these non-deterministic tools and how they were sourced is probably a good broad initiative.

@firefoxwebdevs

I think the challenge with everything going on here is one of clarity.

@sil, you are asking them about disclosure of models and sourcing. But that is far from the only AI that is in the system.

The tool that does grammar checking and language identification does not leverage an LLM, and while there may be some type of model underneath, the context is very different. Tools that detect spam pages or faulty JavaScript that locks the pages, that's another type of AI hard at work.

Is the browser allowed to support speech to text?

@jmax You're calling out that Firefox may not be able to do this, but I think that mischaracterizes the scope of what's happening here.

The browser has several types of non-deterministic, probabilistic tools in it that provide useful services. Now there's a backlash against one very specific version of those non-deterministic, probabilistic tools. But the backlash is vociferous, often unsolvable, and incredibly broad.

It's hard to engage with non-specific anger.