Tech entrepreneur/blogger Anil Dash has been critical of AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas. (He's written that Atlas "substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it's showing you the web," while its prompt-based/command-line interface resembles a clunky text adventure, and it's true purpose seems to be ingesting more training data.) And at the Mozilla Festival in Spain, "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... 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"... 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.Read more of this story at Slashdot.