Back in December, I wrote No AI* Here. I talked about how I don’t believe LLMs have their place in a browser such as Waterfox, due to the inherent privacy risk of sending your browsing data out or having it processed by third parties. Even if you were to use a local LLM, there can still be a privacy risk, unless you develop it yourself from scratch. My position will likely never change for LLM usage in the browser.
But since then, some users have taken it upon themselves to extrapolate what Waterfox is into more than a privacy focused, customisable browser, and instead treat it as anti-AI in every single aspect. I don’t even know where to start with unpacking this, considering the “AI” field in computer science stretches back many decades and contains a vast array of technologies, many of which are inescapable.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face
A few days ago, I raised a warning flag on the privacy policy of Mozilla’s collaboration with Mistral. I finalised the series of posts with, “This isn’t anti-AI just for the sake of it either - LLMs are useful tools. However, even useful tools need boundaries.”
This seemed to cause quite a stir, because a lot of people don’t seem to understand that AI isn’t just LLMs. In fact, some users now demand an impossible puritanical standard: that their software must contain NO AI in its entirety. Any technologist who understands computer technology beyond just the surface knows how unrealistic this is. That includes demands to drop so called AI commits (for which I have no idea what these are, I can only assume they mean upstream commits from Mozilla) completely.
Maybe there was an issue with the wording “LLMs have their uses” - of course, pitchforks at the ready, it seems these users want a web browser that has had all LLM usage scrubbed from it, something that is impossible. Every single major browser engine in existence will have had LLM involvement in some form. In fact, Chrome has had multiple zero days this year, many discovered and assisted by LLMs.
ffmpeg had 21 zero days discovered by LLMs, Firefox itself had over 423 security bugs discovered by LLMs and patched by over 100 volunteers.
It is not just browsers, or media tools. Debian voted to allow responsible use of generative AI - Debian neither endorses nor prohibits such tools, but recognises they can improve productivity when the contributor remains responsible for quality and legal compliance. The Linux kernel itself documents how to use AI coding assistants and curl is patched with AI help on an ongoing basis.
The sheer fact that people want to actively have these fixes dropped because of LLM involvement is the very definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face. And what’s worse is the attitude and vitriol that accompanies it, as if logic no longer has a place and only emotions matter because understanding that the world is more than black and white is too complicated.
Pandora’s jar has been opened, and love them or hate them, LLMs do provide value in security research when used properly. It is just another tool.
This does not mean I support the wanton environmental destruction, the ethical concerns surrounding the development of LLMs, nor the fact that generative AI music and art often amounts to theft.
So to the users who so proudly label themselves “anti-AI” in all its forms, I have to ask - do you use any technology at all? Because unless you’ve sworn off modern computing entirely, you already rely on decades of AI research every day, none of which is an LLM:
- Spam, phishing and fraud filtering - email spam filters, SMS spam detection, your bank flagging a suspicious card payment
- What you type - autocorrect, spellcheck, swipe typing, predictive keyboards
- Search - ranking, autocomplete, “did you mean?”, voice search
- Photos and cameras - Face ID unlock, face grouping in your photo library, Night Mode, HDR, Portrait Mode, background blur
- Voice and calls - Dictation, live captions, noise suppression and echo cancellation in Zoom, Meet and AirPods
- Understanding documents - OCR for check deposit and document scanning, machine translation
- Getting around - Maps ETA and traffic prediction, ride share matching and pricing, lane keep, adaptive cruise and emergency braking
- Safety on device - antivirus heuristics, crash detection, fall detection and AFib detection on watches
- Behind the scenes - weather nowcasting, delivery routing and demand forecasting
Almost all of that is narrow, single purpose machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition and optimisation - the AI field as it has existed for 30+ years. Rejecting all of it is not a privacy position, you’re just decided to opt out of modern computing. But don’t pretend that using any modern technology validates your stance, because it does the opposite.
I will also say, this field has been a boon for accessibility - whether it’s the translation feature that has been a part of Waterfox for over 7 years, pre-dating the public release of LLMs, or alt-text descriptions to assist users with low vision. Taking a blanket anti-AI stance is by all means an ableist position.
Where is the shame
As I posted on Reddit a few weeks ago, human decorum seems to go out of the window when it comes to Waterfox. People seem to forget there is a human being behind Waterfox - only one at that - and that polite discourse is the way to approach, well, anything.
I do hope the users who are “anti-AI” in all its forms take a step back and realise maybe they could be kinder, but on top of that, realise that the world is complex, often times shitty, and I am doing my best to make it just that little bit better, because I do believe my morals and ethics are in the right place here. Not only that, but unless you drop technology completely - and I mean even going back 20 years - you have already interacted with the field of “AI” today.
FAQ
No, it does not. Art, music et al. are all intensely human experiences. I will never come to appreciate or want its usage for that. Not to mention all the ethical concerns surrounding it.
Apart from my detestation of the overuse of this word, no, it is not. Every line of code is my responsibility, the art and design is either done by myself, oftentimes poorly, or I pay someone.
I think after 15 years of dedicating myself to a community, often thanklessly, the whole point of comments, blog posts and the likes are me communicating to you. Apart from the prose output being grating, it is quite frankly a pile of crap.
No. Quite the opposite in fact - and there are many open weight, locally run LLMs that get close enough to state of the art to be useful. Believe it or not, it’s not a zero sum game.
No. I have been so clear on this. I just don’t see how privacy will ever align with the usage of LLMs in the browser or even the services I want to offer in relation to Waterfox.
Good luck to you. Unless it’s NOT a Chromium/Gecko/WebKit based browser it will have had LLM involvement, because it is an impossible standard to meet.
With all that, it is the weekend. I have spent countless hours this week working on Waterfox, making very little from it. I am going to turn off all my notifications and hope that logic prevails.
That said, I would like to thank everyone who engages in good faith, sincerely. To those who disagree respectfully, ask honest questions or simply say thanks every now and again.