TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.
Mozilla is a mythical beast. It has many heads, but no brain. As such its actions and movement are unpredictable, erratic, and… dumb.
Replacing volunteer work with a bot does not make bloody sense dammit. You’ll actually pay for the bot, and the output is worse. The Japanese localisation community already called it quits, and others will follow. And every bloody thing is unnecessarily complex, from Mozilla’s structure to what it makes, even if there’s a single piece of its software people care about — Firefox. And Firefox only survives because its redeeming quality is negative, “Firefox is not Chromium”, without that negative quality Mozilla would be extinct already.
I’m already using librewolf. As soon as I saw Firefox was using ai I figured it was time to switch.
On an individual level, Librewolf is a good idea, because it has saner privacy defaults than Firefox; and its devs are rather good at gutting out the crap.
However, on a collective level, the problem still remains: we have exactly two options, Chromium and Firefox (note LibreWolf is a custom version of Firefox). One is from GAFAM cancer, another is from a GAFAM vassal that keeps doing dumb stuff, since it’s nothing but contained opposition.
True, but projects like LibreWolf are the first step to creating a true fork of Firefox that’s completely out of Mozilla’s hands.
I don’t really care how bad mozilla is, as long as they are better than google I’ll still support them.
‘Betrayal’ is a harsh word for optimizing trivialities with a closed source model. Whether it was a success or not, doesn’t really tell us why it’s a betrayal. I guess this has to do with the current wave of ‘AI-hate’ reactions we see everywhere.
It has to do mostly with overwriting community (human) translations with (worse) machine translations. Paying google to redo the work your community did in good faith but badly with tech that goes against everything they’ve been saying they believe in. Doesn’t really bode well for the “opt-in” and “ethical” LLM features they claim are coming.
