There's so much repeated paranoia in this article. He makes the same weak points over and over.

But how do you keep track of what a black box actually does when it’s turned on?

And later,

And yes, yes - disabling features is all well and good, but at the end of the day, if these AI features are black boxes, how are we to keep track of what they actually do?

Why would you have to care? You turned them off. The browser is open source. You can see how it invokes the LLMs. If you turn off the features that invoke LLMs, it will not invoke LLMs. I don't get it. Where's the disconnect here? The browser is not a black box. The LLM it talks to in the cloud is a black box. If it doesn't talk to any LLM... 🤷‍♂️

The core browsing experience should be one that fully puts the user in control, not one where you’re constantly monitoring an inscrutable system that claims to be helping you.

Jesus... The bias in this article is extreme and repeated often. "claims to be helping"... he even said earlier that LLMs have a measurable utility. Why are they suddenly merely "claiming" to be helpful?

Why do you have to constantly monitor something you turned off? Really? Constantly?

Even if you can disable individual AI features, the cognitive load of monitoring an opaque system that’s supposedly working on your behalf would be overwhelming.

"Overwhelming cognitive load". Riiight. I turned off telemetry in Firefox as soon as I installed it. I don't constantly monitor that setting. There is zero cognitive load. I'll do the same to the AI features if I don't want them. Also, again with the "supposedly working for you" or "claiming to be helpful" language. Such bias.

They promise AI will be optional, but that promise acknowledges they’re building AI so deeply into Firefox that an opt-out mechanism becomes necessary in the first place.

That's such terrible logic, but so is my original counterargument as pointed out by Undertaker below.

~~If something has an opt-out, it has to be "so deeply" built into it? Are the current new-tab features deeply built into Firefox? Like Pocket and such? They're opt out. Are address bar completions "so deeply" integrated? They're opt out, too. Is the crash reporter "so deeply" integrated into Firefox? That's opt out!~~

~~Hell, you could argue crash reporting is deeply integrated because maybe there are many try-catch blocks all over the code which use it, but if you're the kind of person who turned it off, does it require an "overwhelming cognitive load" to keep it off? Nonsense.~~

I still don't think turning a setting off requires "overwhelming cognitive load".

This article is a bombastic mass of paranoia and bad logic.

If Firefox releases AI things you can't just turn off, that can be easily invoked by accident—gestures, keyboard shortcuts, or whatever—that might send page content to an LLM, then I will stop using it. Until then, I'm happy with Firefox. It will always be more up to date than the derivatives.