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In my opinion, the goal of increasing automation has gone from a useful relief of labor to an obsession that will lead nowhere. Globally, this seems to be refle

In my opinion, the goal of increasing automation has gone from a useful relief of labor to an obsession that will lead nowhere. Globally, this seems to be reflected only by increasing resource use and increasing ignorance of the natural world by producing purely for the sake of making consumerism more efficient. AI assistant in a browser...it's getting ridiculous.

rplnt 3y ago
> for the sake of making consumerism more efficient If only. This wave of AI integrations is primarily focused on pleasing (potential) investors.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  You need customers who bring in money to please investors over the long-haul.
- benreesman 3y ago
  If only. This wave of AI integrations is happening in a context/framework for normalizing naked avarice so that preposterous power can be concentrated in the hands of the rich and dubiously ethical.
Almondsetat 3y ago
You just assert that it is ridiculous without any motivations
realharo 3y ago
AI assistant in a browser makes sense if it's acting as an extension of your memory - for example you're browsing some items you're considering buying, and the assistant creates a summary spreadsheet with their comparison, that you can later look at, etc. Could be useful for things like real estate. Most AI tools I've seen however can't seem to get away from the classic "prompt -> response" chat UI.
surajrmal 3y ago
Some ai features make a lot of sense. Automatically organizing tabs is amazing for helping me not get lost in a sea of tabs. Longer form auto complete saves me time, at least on mobile. I used to rely on Reddit comments to summarize trashy low quality articles to give me the primary points. Now that I've been reddit sober for a while, it's been helpful to have my browser do that summarization for me, helping me stay away from Reddit. I can't say I will use every ai feature, but so far they've been helpful. I don't feel more ignorant. What I think makes people ignorant is outsourcing labor tasks like a cleaner for the home, a gardener for the yard, or handyman for basic repairs. I don't think those are necessarily wrong to outsource though.
123yawaworht456 3y ago
there are several AI features I would absolutely love to see integrated into the browser, primarily, content filtering with my own custom criteria. for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not. hell, even images could be filtered with vision models, including local ones. I'd fucking love to hide a few broad categories of images from my sight, e.g. clickbaity youtube thumbnails (DeArrow helps to a degree)
- everdrive 3y ago
  This is just an arms race. It expends more energy, and the "solution" from the other side will be to pump more garbage in.
  - 123yawaworht456 3y ago
    you could save even more energy by not using computing devices at all.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  > for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not." FWIW, I once used naive Bayes classification solely on HN headlines and it worked reasonably well for solving the problem you're describing.
tempodox 3y ago
The browser will be even less under our control than before, surveillance will go to the next level, and your private data will land in even more obscure places than before. Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.
- saurik 3y ago
  > “AI” will be the end of ad blockers... On the contrary, I feel like AI--even if it doesn't advance much further than the level we already have achieved--is putting us at the cusp of finally being able to have good end-game fully-working ad blockers: I'll just have an AI in my browser read / look at / watch / "experience" your content and then launder away any and all ads in its presentation to me... I can even have it make extreme edits if required, rebuilding the audio and video, to remove subtle bias your content wants to infect me with due to sponsorship deals. What is fighting to prevent ad blockers is not AI... it is pervasive DRM: if we live in a world where the tech platforms continue to side with Big Content and prevent us from being able to capture and alter media as we see it on devices they insist we "buy" and yet never "own"--and where the business models of the most powerful companies rely on proving that an end-user human affirmatively was on the other side of an interaction (and thereby might have been infected with paid propaganda)--we are stuck inside of a dystopia :(.
  - tempodox 3y ago
    That's definitely a valid way of looking at it. I do hope your first paragraph comes to pass.
  - aqfamnzc 3y ago
    Your "end-game" AI tool sounds good, and would work I think, but I think the opposing endgame strategy for advertisers is fully verified DRM chain all the way from incoming network packets to the display's pixels. Network -> Web Environment Integrity -> HDCP. No room in there for an AI middleman. :(
    - 3y ago
dkarras 3y ago
what is ridiculous about it? I read the gist of the articles I am mildly curious about by summarizing them on the spot. If it sounds more interesting than I thought I read it in full. Saves me time. Sometimes I ask one or two clarifying questions as well. Arc browser has this built in and I find it very useful. I summarize the transcripts of 20+ min. long youtube videos to get the gist, which is what I am interested in anyways. Saves me time. (this is something I built custom for my use, maybe there are other options for this) It is not an obsession. I always wanted something, someone that could do this for me, and now we have it.
- imiric 3y ago
  If the AI is summarizing web pages, why couldn't this be done with a browser extension? If the AI is summarizing files the user downloads, why couldn't this be done with external tools? In general though, why does the browser itself need to be "smart"? Its primary, and perhaps only, goal should be to render web pages... I feel like this push to integrate AI features into browsers is done so that companies can promote their own (completely unrelated) AI services, and pull people even more into their ecosystem. It's obnoxious.
  - dkarras 3y ago
    It can be done with a browser extension, and external tools. I only care about the friction, speed and ease of use. I am indifferent to where the functionality comes from, really. I'd like to have a very scriptable barebones browser alas such a thing does not exist as far as I know, so if the browser has them handy and it provides good experience, it is a net positive for me in any case.
    - imiric 3y ago
      Sure, I can see how it would be useful, but wouldn't you prefer to have the choice of which AI to use? What if Brave's AI is worse than Chrome's, which is worse than ChatGPT? Or what if it's better, and you're now tied to that browser, even though you'd otherwise use something else? Even if I had this functionality built-in, I would still prefer to use something else. Even if that's slightly more cumbersome, though there will probably be extensions for this sort of thing, if they don't exist already. But, to each their own. :)
dghughes 3y ago
It truly is just a modern day Clippy.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Hardly. Clippy was hated because he interrupted you with unhelpful suggestions. I played around with the Leo thing a little bit and it never interrupts you; actually I had to dig through the UI a bit to figure out how to activate it at all. Anyway, now that this sort of technology exists, Microsoft is missing a great opportunity to bring back clippy and cash in on some nostalgia. I miss that lil guy.
prng2021 3y ago
What’s wrong with AI in a browser? Each SaaS app you use in a browser has or will have AI. Is the AI built by each of those ridiculous? If not, then what is ridiculous about a browser striving to create a general AI than can apply to any site you visit within that browser?

rplnt 3y ago

> for the sake of making consumerism more efficient If only. This wave of AI integrations is primarily focused on pleasing (potential) investors.

WillAdams 3y ago
You need customers who bring in money to please investors over the long-haul.
benreesman 3y ago
If only. This wave of AI integrations is happening in a context/framework for normalizing naked avarice so that preposterous power can be concentrated in the hands of the rich and dubiously ethical.

Almondsetat 3y ago

You just assert that it is ridiculous without any motivations

realharo 3y ago

AI assistant in a browser makes sense if it's acting as an extension of your memory - for example you're browsing some items you're considering buying, and the assistant creates a summary spreadsheet with their comparison, that you can later look at, etc. Could be useful for things like real estate. Most AI tools I've seen however can't seem to get away from the classic "prompt -> response" chat UI.

surajrmal 3y ago

Some ai features make a lot of sense. Automatically organizing tabs is amazing for helping me not get lost in a sea of tabs. Longer form auto complete saves me time, at least on mobile. I used to rely on Reddit comments to summarize trashy low quality articles to give me the primary points. Now that I've been reddit sober for a while, it's been helpful to have my browser do that summarization for me, helping me stay away from Reddit. I can't say I will use every ai feature, but so far they've been helpful. I don't feel more ignorant. What I think makes people ignorant is outsourcing labor tasks like a cleaner for the home, a gardener for the yard, or handyman for basic repairs. I don't think those are necessarily wrong to outsource though.

123yawaworht456 3y ago

there are several AI features I would absolutely love to see integrated into the browser, primarily, content filtering with my own custom criteria. for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not. hell, even images could be filtered with vision models, including local ones. I'd fucking love to hide a few broad categories of images from my sight, e.g. clickbaity youtube thumbnails (DeArrow helps to a degree)

everdrive 3y ago
This is just an arms race. It expends more energy, and the "solution" from the other side will be to pump more garbage in.
- 123yawaworht456 3y ago
  you could save even more energy by not using computing devices at all.
lupusreal 3y ago
> for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not." FWIW, I once used naive Bayes classification solely on HN headlines and it worked reasonably well for solving the problem you're describing.

tempodox 3y ago

The browser will be even less under our control than before, surveillance will go to the next level, and your private data will land in even more obscure places than before. Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.

saurik 3y ago
> “AI” will be the end of ad blockers... On the contrary, I feel like AI--even if it doesn't advance much further than the level we already have achieved--is putting us at the cusp of finally being able to have good end-game fully-working ad blockers: I'll just have an AI in my browser read / look at / watch / "experience" your content and then launder away any and all ads in its presentation to me... I can even have it make extreme edits if required, rebuilding the audio and video, to remove subtle bias your content wants to infect me with due to sponsorship deals. What is fighting to prevent ad blockers is not AI... it is pervasive DRM: if we live in a world where the tech platforms continue to side with Big Content and prevent us from being able to capture and alter media as we see it on devices they insist we "buy" and yet never "own"--and where the business models of the most powerful companies rely on proving that an end-user human affirmatively was on the other side of an interaction (and thereby might have been infected with paid propaganda)--we are stuck inside of a dystopia :(.
- tempodox 3y ago
  That's definitely a valid way of looking at it. I do hope your first paragraph comes to pass.
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  Your "end-game" AI tool sounds good, and would work I think, but I think the opposing endgame strategy for advertisers is fully verified DRM chain all the way from incoming network packets to the display's pixels. Network -> Web Environment Integrity -> HDCP. No room in there for an AI middleman. :(
  - 3y ago

dkarras 3y ago

what is ridiculous about it? I read the gist of the articles I am mildly curious about by summarizing them on the spot. If it sounds more interesting than I thought I read it in full. Saves me time. Sometimes I ask one or two clarifying questions as well. Arc browser has this built in and I find it very useful. I summarize the transcripts of 20+ min. long youtube videos to get the gist, which is what I am interested in anyways. Saves me time. (this is something I built custom for my use, maybe there are other options for this) It is not an obsession. I always wanted something, someone that could do this for me, and now we have it.

imiric 3y ago
If the AI is summarizing web pages, why couldn't this be done with a browser extension? If the AI is summarizing files the user downloads, why couldn't this be done with external tools? In general though, why does the browser itself need to be "smart"? Its primary, and perhaps only, goal should be to render web pages... I feel like this push to integrate AI features into browsers is done so that companies can promote their own (completely unrelated) AI services, and pull people even more into their ecosystem. It's obnoxious.
- dkarras 3y ago
  It can be done with a browser extension, and external tools. I only care about the friction, speed and ease of use. I am indifferent to where the functionality comes from, really. I'd like to have a very scriptable barebones browser alas such a thing does not exist as far as I know, so if the browser has them handy and it provides good experience, it is a net positive for me in any case.
  - imiric 3y ago
    Sure, I can see how it would be useful, but wouldn't you prefer to have the choice of which AI to use? What if Brave's AI is worse than Chrome's, which is worse than ChatGPT? Or what if it's better, and you're now tied to that browser, even though you'd otherwise use something else? Even if I had this functionality built-in, I would still prefer to use something else. Even if that's slightly more cumbersome, though there will probably be extensions for this sort of thing, if they don't exist already. But, to each their own. :)

dghughes 3y ago

It truly is just a modern day Clippy.

lupusreal 3y ago
Hardly. Clippy was hated because he interrupted you with unhelpful suggestions. I played around with the Leo thing a little bit and it never interrupts you; actually I had to dig through the UI a bit to figure out how to activate it at all. Anyway, now that this sort of technology exists, Microsoft is missing a great opportunity to bring back clippy and cash in on some nostalgia. I miss that lil guy.

prng2021 3y ago

What’s wrong with AI in a browser? Each SaaS app you use in a browser has or will have AI. Is the AI built by each of those ridiculous? If not, then what is ridiculous about a browser striving to create a general AI than can apply to any site you visit within that browser?