Pale Moon's stance on A.I.

[Moonchild]

To not bury the lead: No, Pale Moon will not be integrating A.I. into itself in any way, shape or form.

Artificial Intelligence in its current form can be a great tool... for certain situations. But its ubiquitous shoehorning into everything and anything is one of the biggest mistakes the IT sector as a whole is currently making. A.I. can be great to fast-track initial steps of creative jobs, to quickly come to concepts that can be worked out and detailed (by people) after that, for example. That is where A.I. can really shine: to come up with novel concepts by combining and recombining past work by people in ways nobody had thought to try before.

On the consuming side of information though, it's missing the mark in major ways, because of a single flaw: There is no such thing as "no answer" for an LLM. If it doesn't know, it will fabricate something with random recombinations of patterns. That is great for creative tasks but not for facts or wanting to reference anything. It is least of all a suitable tool for searching for information because there is always the inherent probability you ask the "wrong" thing and get garbage.
As a result, it is likely you will be misinformed, at one point or another, and will be forced to double- or triple-check every result you get. And how are you going to do that when your "checking tool" is A.I. driven suffering from the same issues?

Pale Moon, and any other web browser, has a very specific purpose: to display documents and articles, where the trust in the displayed content can be evaluated by where the information comes from. A.I. would take away the option to verify this trust because there is no distinction to be made as to source when it is being spit out by A.I., even if it decides to link references. A.I.-based search or agentic browsing will always have this problem, because it will always process the data through a system of probabilities (that is its very nature) and can (and will) manipulate the content presented to you in one way or another, which can completely misinform you as a user. So, in my opinion, it has absolutely no place in a web browser, and we will not be adding any sort of A.I.-based "features" to Pale Moon. We even offer a no-AI searchplugin for our default search engine (DDG) to bypass A.I. summaries in your results; you can find that here.