Noting their blog response: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
Essentially, they claim to still not be monetizing the consumer. I can find no reporting claiming that they have monetized any consumer, and it’s been almost a year.
The people who have made that category error aren’t reading this discussion, so literally reaching them isn’t on the table and doesn’t make sense for this discussion. Presumably we’re concerned about people who will soon make that jump? I also don’t think that making this distinction helps them very much.
If I’m already having the ‘this is a person’ reaction, I think the takes in this thread are much too shallow (and, if I squint, patterned after school-yard bullying) to help update in the other way. Almost all of them are themselves lazy metaphors. “An LLM is a person because its an agent” and “An LLM isn’t a person because it repeats things others have said” seem equally shallow and unconvincing to me. If anything, you’ll get folks being defensive about it, downvoted, and then leaving this community of mostly people for a more bot filled one.
I don’t get think this is good strategy. People falling for bots are unlikely to have interactions with people here, and if they are the ugliness is likely to increase bot use imo.
I think this confuses the ‘it’s a person’ metaphor with the ‘it wants something’ metaphor, and the two are meaningfully distinct. The use of agent here in this thread is not in the sense of “it is my friend and deserves a luxury bath”, it’s in the sense of “this is a hard to predict system performing tasks to optimize something”.
It’s the kind of metaphor we’ve allowed in scientific teaching and discourse for centuries (think: “gravity wants all master smashed together”). I think it’s use is correct here.
We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.
Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.
I think this model is really under utilized. Sortition for policing. Sortition for doing the dishes. Sortition for airport security checks, policy, and officers. Sortition for evaluating corporate compliance. Shareholder sortition for the c-suite.
Random ballot is also a better model for voting imo; the model where it’s actually worth your time to vote, checks and balances get maintained, and so many rigging strategies necessarily backfire with regularity.
I do not understand it either; my best guess is that some law intern messed up real bad, and convinced somebody it was a risky thing to leave written down.
But yes, I’m really really interested in if they do stop being a private browser. As you say, actions speak louder than words, and a TOU always felt like a pile of words to me.