Today, Rodrigo Ghedrin wrote the very well-intentioned, but incorrectly-titled,  “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”. As he correctly summarizes, sentiment on the Mozilla thread about a potential new AI pane in the Firefox browser is overwhelmingly negative. That’s not surprising; the Big AI companies have given people numerous legitimate reasons to hate and reject “AI” products, ranging from undermining labor to appropriating content without consent to having egregious environmental impacts to eroding trust in public discourse.

I spent much of the last week having the distinct honor of serving as MC at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona, which gave me the extraordinary opportunity to talk to hundreds of the most engaged Mozilla community members in person, and to address thousands more from onstage or on the livestream during the event. No surprise, one of the biggest topics we talked about the entire time was AI, and the intense, complex, and passionate feelings so many have about these new tools. Virtually everyone shared some version of what I’d articulated as the majority view on AI, which is approximately that LLMs can be interesting as a technology, but that Big Tech, and especially Big AI, are decidedly awful and people are very motivated to stop them from committing their worst harms upon the vulnerable.

But.

Another reality that people were a little more quiet in acknowledging, and sometimes reluctant to engage with out loud, is the reality that hundreds of millions of people are using the major AI tools every day. When I would point this out, there was often an initial defensive reaction talking about how people are forced to use these tools at work, or how AI is being shoehorned into every tool and foisted upon users. This is all true! And also? Hundreds of millions of users are choosing to go to these websites, of their own volition, and engage with these tools.

Regular, non-expert internet users find it interesting, or even amusing, to generate images or videos using AI and to send that media to their friends. While sophisticated media aesthetics find those creations gauche or even offensive, a lot of other cultures find them perfectly acceptable. And it’s an inarguable reality that millions of people find AI-generated media images emotionally moving. Most people that see AI-generated content as tolerable folk art belong to demographics that are dismissed by those who shape the technology platforms that billions of people use every day.

Which brings us back to “nobody wants AI in Firefox”. (And its obligatory matching Hacker News thread, which proceeds exactly as you might expect.) In the communities that frequent places like Hacker News and Mozilla forums, where everyone is hyper-fluent in concerns like intellectual property rights and the abuses of Big Tech, it’s received wisdom that “everyone” resists the encroachment of AI into tools, and therefore the only possible reason that Mozilla (or any organization) might add support for any kind of AI features would be to chase a trend that’s in fashion amongst tech tycoons. I don’t doubt that this is a factor; anytime a significant percentage of decision makers are alumni of Silicon Valley, its culture is going to seep into an organization.

The War On Pop-Ups

What people are ignoring, though, is that using AI tools is an incredibly mainstream experience now. Regular people do it all the time. And doing so in normal browsers, in a normal context, is less safe. We can look at an analogy from the early days of the browser wars, a generation ago.

Twenty years ago, millions and millions of people used Internet Explorer to get around the web, because it was the default browser that came with their computer. It was buggy and wildly insecure, and users would often find their screen littered with intrusive pop-up advertisements that had been spawned by various sites that they had visited across the web. We could have said, “well, those are simply fools with no taste using bad technology who get what they deserve”

Instead, countless enthusiasts and advocates across the web decided that everyone deserved to have an experience that was better and safer. And as it turned out, while getting those improvements, people could even get access to a cool new feature that nobody had seen before: tabs! Firefox wasn’t the first browser to invent all these little details, but it was the first to put them all together into one convenient little package. Even if the expert users weren’t personally visiting the sites riddled with pop-up ads themselves, they were glad to have spared their non-expert friends from the miseries they were enduring on the broken internet.

I don’t know why today’s Firefox users, even if they’re the most rabid anti-AI zealots in the world, don’t say, “well, even if I hate AI, I want to make sure Firefox is good at protecting the privacy of AI users so I can recommend it to my friends and family who use AI”. I have to assume it’s because they’re in denial about the fact that their friends and family are using these platforms. (Judging by the tenor of their comments on the topic, I’d have to guess their friends don’t want to engage with them on the topic at all.)

We see with tools like ChatGPT’s Atlas that there are now aggressively anti-web browsers coming to market, and even a sophisticated user might not be able to realize how nefarious some of the tactics of these new apps can be. I think those who are critical can certainly see that those enabling those harms are bad actors. And those critics are also aware that hundreds of millions of people are using ChatGPT. So, then… what browser do they think those users should use?

What does good look like?

Judging by what I see in the comments on the posts about Firefox’s potential AI feature integrations, the apparent path that critics are recommending as an alternative browser is “I’ll yell at you until you stop using ChatGPT”. Consider this post my official notice: that strategy hasn’t worked. And it is not going to work. The only thing that will work is to offer a better alternative to these users. That will involve defining what an acceptably “good” alternative AI looks like, and then building and shipping it to these users, and convincing them to use it. I’m hoping such an effort succeeds. But I can guarantee that scolding people and trying to convince them that they’re not finding utility in the current platforms, or trying to make them feel guilty about the fact that they are finding utility in the current platforms, will not work.

And none of this is exculpatory for my friends at Mozilla. As I’ve said to the good people there, and will share again here, I don’t think the framing of the way this feature has been presented has done either the Firefox team or the community any favors. These big, emotional blow-ups are demoralizing, and take away time and energy and attention that could be better spent getting people excited and motivated to grow for the future.

My personal wishlist would be pretty simple:

* Just give people the “shut off all AI features” button. It’s a tiny percentage of people who want it, but they’re never going to shut up about it, and they’re convinced they’re the whole world and they can’t distinguish between being mad at big companies and being mad at a technology so give them a toggle switch and write up a blog post explaining how extraordinarily expensive it is to maintain a configuration option over the lifespan of a global product.

* Market Firefox as “The best AI browser for people who hate Big AI”. Regular users have no idea how creepy the Big AI companies are — they’ve just heard their local news talk about how AI is the inevitable future. If Mozilla can warn me how to protect my privacy from ChatGPT, then it can also mention that ChatGPT tells children how to self-harm, and should be aggressive in engaging with the community on how to build tools that help mitigate those kinds of harms — how do we catalyze that innovation?

* Remind people that there isn’t “a Firefox” — everyone is Firefox. Whether it’s Zen, or your custom build of Firefox with your favorite extensions and skins, it’s all part of the same story. Got a local LLM that runs entirely as a Firefox extension? Great! That should be one of the many Firefoxes, too. Right now, so much of the drama and heightened emotions and tension are coming from people’s (well… dudes') egos about there being One True Firefox, and wanting to be the one who controls what’s in that version, as an expression of one set of values. This isn’t some blood-feud fork, there can just be a lot of different choices for different situations. Make it all work.

So, that’s the answer. I think some people want AI in Firefox, Mozilla. And some people don’t. And some people don’t know what “AI” means. And some people forgot Firefox even exists. It’s that last category I’m most concerned about, frankly. Let’s go get ‘em.