[danpalmer]

Opting out of "AI" is performative and pointless for companies to support. "AI" has been woven throughout most of the tech products we use for decades at this point. We're in a brief period where people are noticing the new crop of AI features, but AI is an implementation detail that will disappear into the background. Even just looking at modern transformer-based language models, most of it is happening in the background and not visible.

Opting out of AI would be like saying that you don't use JavaScript because you don't like the moral position of the guy who wrote it. That's a reasonable moral position to take (I totally get not wanting to use LLMs for reasons of copyright, art, or even just capability), but a completely unreasonable technical position to take, functionally impossible.

Why does Mozilla not give you a convenient opt out? Because it's hard, low impact, and functionally no-one wants it.

[AlexandrB]

I think it's unfortunate that everything gets called AI, but people are clearly upset by the LLM stuff, which has not been around for decades. Also, it's still pretty easy to disable JS AFAIK so that comparison kind of proves the point that this should be an option.

I really don't get folks who defend tech paternalism - where features are pushed on users because "daddy knows best".

[danpalmer]

Opting out of a specific feature is completely reasonable, I can get behind the push back on tech paternalism, but opting out of a basically unconnected set of features based on an implementation detail is the bit that I think is unnecessary.