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Automatically generated page summaries as an experimental feature of Firefox 139 nightly
(www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Pray tell, how am I making anyone's browsing experience worse? I disallow LLM scrapers and AI agents. Human visitors are welcome. You can visit any of my sites with Firefox, even 139 Nightly, and it will Just Work Fine™. It will show garbage if you try to use an AI summary, but AI summaries are garbage anyway, so nothing of value is lost there.
I'm all for a free and open internet, as long as my visitors act respectfully, and don't try to DDoS me from a thousand IP addresses, trying to train on my work, without respecting the license. The LLM scrapers and AI agents do not respect my work, nor its license, so they get a nice dose of garbage. Coincidentally, this greatly reduces the load on my backend, so legit visitors can actually access what they seek. Banning LLM scrapers & AI bots improves the experience of my legit visitors, because my backend doesn't crumble under the load.
LLM scrapers? What are you on about? This feature will fetch the page and summarize it locally. It's not being used for training LLMs. It's practically like the user opened your website manually and skimmed the content. If your garbage summary doesn't work I'll just copy your site and paste it in ChatGPT to summarize it for me. Pretty much the equivalent of what this is.
Your ignorance annoys me. It has value to a lot of people including me so it's not garbage. But if you make it garbage intentionally then everyone will just believe your website is garbage and not click the link after reading the summary.
And what do you think the local model is trained on?
It is not. A human visitor will skim through, and pick out the parts they're interested in. A human visitor has intelligence. An AI model does not. An AI model has absolutely no clue what they user is looking for, and it is entirely possible (and frequent) that it discards the important bits, and dreams up some bullshit. Yes, even local ones. Yes, I tried, on my own sites. It was bad.
If it does, please don't come anywhere near my stuff. I don't share my work only for an AI to throw away half of it and summarize it badly.
If people who prefer AI summaries stop visiting, I'll consider that as a win. I write for humans, not for bots. If someone doesn't like my style, or finds me too verbose, then my content is not for them, simple as that. And that's ok, too! I have no intention of appealing to everyone.
A human using a browser feature/extension you personally disapprove of does not make them a bot. Once your content is inside my browser I have the right to disrespect it as I see fit.
Not that I see much value in "AI summaries" of course - but this feels very much like the "adblocking is theft" type discourse of past years.
So...? It is my site. If I see visitors engaging in behaviour I deem disrespectful or harmful, I'll show them the boot, bot or human. If someone comes to my party, and starts behaving badly, I will kick them out. If someone shows up at work, and starts harassing people, they will be dealt with (hopefully!). If someone starts trying to DoS my services, I will block them.
Blocking unwanted behaviour is normal. I don't like anything AI near my stuff, so I will block them. If anyone thinks they're entitled to my work regardless, that's their problem, not mine. If they leave because my hard stance on AI, that's a win.
Then I have the right to tell you in advance to fuck off, and serve you garbage! Good, we're on the same page then!