Latest nightly builds of Firefox 139 include an experimental web link preview feature which shows (among other things) an AI-generated summary of what that page is purportedly about before you visit it, saving you time, a click, or the need to ‘hear’ a real human voice.
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Hell yeah! My local news sites always go on and on about stupid stuff before getting to the point. Which is almost always “we don’t know”.
This feels like windows recall…
Except without the shitty parts where it keeps a log of everything you do and sends it off your device, luckily.
Well, it is sending it off your device to the AI’s API. Luckily it won’t have any id information, such as cookies, screen size, OS, IP, etc.
The problem seems to be with the word luckily.
Huh? The article says:
it is generated locally, on your device
Did I misread something?
(Agreed that this should be the norm and not luck.)
I wonder if the preview does a pre-fetch which can be identified as such? As in, I wonder if I’d be able to serve garbage for the AI summarizer, but the regular content to normal views. Guess I’ll have to check!
Update: It looks like it sends an
X-Firefox-Ai: 1header. Cool. I can catch that, and deal with it.Definitely won’t be visiting your website then if you intentionally fuck with people to make their browsing experience worse. I hate web hosters who are against the free and open internet.
Pray tell, how am I making anyone’s browsing experience worse? I disallow LLM scrapers and AI agents. Human visitors are welcome. You can visit any of my sites with Firefox, even 139 Nightly, and it will Just Work Fine™. It will show garbage if you try to use an AI summary, but AI summaries are garbage anyway, so nothing of value is lost there.
I’m all for a free and open internet, as long as my visitors act respectfully, and don’t try to DDoS me from a thousand IP addresses, trying to train on my work, without respecting the license. The LLM scrapers and AI agents do not respect my work, nor its license, so they get a nice dose of garbage. Coincidentally, this greatly reduces the load on my backend, so legit visitors can actually access what they seek. Banning LLM scrapers & AI bots improves the experience of my legit visitors, because my backend doesn’t crumble under the load.
LLM scrapers? What are you on about? This feature will fetch the page and summarize it locally. It’s not being used for training LLMs. It’s practically like the user opened your website manually and skimmed the content. If your garbage summary doesn’t work I’ll just copy your site and paste it in ChatGPT to summarize it for me. Pretty much the equivalent of what this is.
AI summaries are garbage anyway, so nothing of value is lost there.
Your ignorance annoys me. It has value to a lot of people including me so it’s not garbage. But if you make it garbage intentionally then everyone will just believe your website is garbage and not click the link after reading the summary.
This feature will fetch the page and summarize it locally. It’s not being used for training LLMs.
And what do you think the local model is trained on?
It’s practically like the user opened your website manually and skimmed the content
It is not. A human visitor will skim through, and pick out the parts they’re interested in. A human visitor has intelligence. An AI model does not. An AI model has absolutely no clue what they user is looking for, and it is entirely possible (and frequent) that it discards the important bits, and dreams up some bullshit. Yes, even local ones. Yes, I tried, on my own sites. It was bad.
It has value to a lot of people including me so it’s not garbage.
If it does, please don’t come anywhere near my stuff. I don’t share my work only for an AI to throw away half of it and summarize it badly.
But if you make it garbage intentionally then everyone will just believe your website is garbage and not click the link after reading the summary.
If people who prefer AI summaries stop visiting, I’ll consider that as a win. I write for humans, not for bots. If someone doesn’t like my style, or finds me too verbose, then my content is not for them, simple as that. And that’s ok, too! I have no intention of appealing to everyone.
A human using a browser feature/extension you personally disapprove of does not make them a bot. Once your content is inside my browser I have the right to disrespect it as I see fit.
Not that I see much value in “AI summaries” of course - but this feels very much like the “adblocking is theft” type discourse of past years.
Alternatively, you could make your response more useful, removing the UI to aid the AI. After all, the user should be allowed to choose how they navigate the web.
I am doing exactly that. AI turns my work into garbage, so I serve them garbage in the first place, so they have less work to do. I am helping AI!
I’m also helping AI using visitors: they will either stop that practice, or stop visiting my stuff. In either case, we’re both better off.
