I like this take

Superbly well said! And essential for understanding and unpacking what "the people want it" really means when leveraged in arguments.

Now for the but - by the sake token, there are applications of LLMs that can step in to do grunt work we don't want to do (e.g. an on-the-go greasemonkey replacement that can change pages in some customized way in response to natural language requests), or engagements with art and creativity that, to the satisfaction of everyone, is something other than slop. But it shouldn't be used to advocate for constantly lowering the lowest common denominator.

Well said

Because AI is a massive waste of resources that has yet to prove (to me at least) that it can provide any kind of real benefit to humanity that couldn't be better provided by another, less resource intensive means. Advocating for 'common' AI use is absurd in the face of the amount of energy and other resources consumed by that usage, especially in the face of a looming climate crises being exacerbated by excesses like this.

LLMs may have valid uses, I doubt it, but they may. Using it to make memes and generate answers of questionable veracity to questions that would be better resolved with a Google search is just dumb.

Hi, hope you don't mind me giving my two cents.

Local models are at their m9st useful in daily life when they scrape data from a reliable factual database or from the internet and then present/discuss that data to you through natural language conversation.

Think about searching for things on the internet now a days. Every search provider stuffs ads in top results and intentionally ofsucates the links your looking for especially if its a no-no term like pirating torrent sites.

Local llms can act as an advanced generalized RSS reader that automatically fetches articles and sources, send STEM based queries to wolfram alpha llm api and retrieve answers, fetch the weather directly from openweatherAPI, retrieve definitions and meanings from local dictionary, retrieve Wikipedia article pages from a local kiwix server, search ArXiv directly for prior searching. One of Claude's big selling points is the research mode toolcall that scrapes hundreds of sites to collect up to date data on the thing your researching and presenting its finins in a neat structured way with cited sources. It does in minutes what would traditionally take a human hours or days of manual googling.

There are genuine uses for llms if your a nerdy computer homelab type of person familiar databases, data handling and can code up/integrate some basic api pipelines. The main challenge is selling these kinds of functions in an easy to understand and use way for the tech illiterate who already think bad of llms and similar due to generative slop. A positive future for llms integrated into Firefox would be something trained to fetch from your favorite sources and sift out the crap based on your preferences/keywords. More sites would have APIs for direct scraping and the key adding process would be one click button

Cigarettes, credit scores, fidget spinners, AI slop on facebook, payday loans!

They may as well make the same argument about advertisements in general: "we filled Instagram with obnoxious ads and a bunch of them are clicking!"

Its completely true that not all use is because of being forced to use it though. Lots of people do love using these tools whether for their own amusement or because they find it useful whether we like it or not. He's right.

Which is awful marketing, because of how real people respond to that.

This could have been an extension downloaded by only the people who want it and no one would have complained. Nothing like developing a full featured extension system and promptly not using it for a feature they know for a fact people have very polarized opinions about. What is it called when software ships with random shit nobody wanted or asked for and can't be removed? Oh right! Bloatware!

"Oh just disable it" yeah just like the Android apps that came with my phone which have disable instead of uninstall in settings. A nice big middle finger to the user that makes it clear they don't want them in control of their own devices.

If I wanted an "AI browser" or a browser with every feature under the sun related to web browsing or not, I'd be using Edge. Nobody is choosing Firefox because they want the same experience as a big tech corporate browser, they'd choose an actual big tech corporate browser in that case.