Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?
AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!" features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.
I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn on a light!).
Yeah, and billions of people on the planet can't build your little webcam feed website to solve their problem, so they're more likely to need it than you.
It's like you think we should limit AI use-cases to what you can personally imagine. As if someone could have predicted your webcam use-case.
Not at all, I just think going around seeing if AI fits is the same as going around with a hammer looking for nails. Let the problems lead you to a solution, don't start with "what can we solve with this?"
"You'll have computers in your home, you can look at a schedule or store recipes!" AI is being shoehorned in weird places, it's in the "kitchen recipes" stage where all we can come up with are chatbots. I think it's premature and wasteful, and will cost regular users a lot of money on wasted AI potential simply because these companies have to recoup some of their investment, even at the cost of user experience and utility.
In some cases I do find that useful, but more generally I find that having a quick chat about a document after reading it is a good way to interrogate my own understanding of the document.
I agree that it's probably not for everybody. But I do think that by putting tools like this out there, Firefox users may find unanticipated uses for it, which in turn may inform more thoughtfully implemented futures in the future. You've got to walk before you can run.
Chatbot integration number 7193: no thanks.