Why Vivaldi's Anti-AI Browser Is Great News For Humanity

AI is absolutely everywhere, but what if you don't want it? One browser company has stated that it will remain blissfully AI-free.

Vivaldi has stated that it will not add AI to its browser, citing concerns about accuracy, ethics, and the environment. With even Firefox experimenting with AI assistants, it’s more important than ever to have a refuge like this. One of the dangers of our internet monoculture, dominated by a few platforms, is that it's hard to escape whatever Silicon Valley decides we should be doing next. The even better news is that Vivaldi is a pretty great browser, and available almost everywhere.

"[P]rops to the Vivaldi team for taking such [a] clear and firm stance. There’s a ton of pressure from big money interests to add machine learning to everything from your operating system to your nail scissors, and popular tech publishers are certainly going to publish articles decrying Vivaldi’s choice, so they’re not doing this without any risk," writes operating system and open-source expert Thom Holwerda on his OS News blog.

Anti-AI

AI is absolutely everywhere right now, and it seems like it's getting harder and harder to escape. On the one side are large companies like Microsoft and Apple that scrape the "open web" for copyrighted data to feed their training models without asking permission or offering anybody a way to optionally opt-in. On the other side are operating system features like CoPilot Recall from Microsoft or pretty much the entirety of iOS 18, which force AI features onto users, with no way to opt out other than to not buy the latest devices.

The problems of AI are manifold. For a start, it's far from intelligent, delivering a slurry of weirdly wrong images or dangerous made-up nonsense text. Then, as mentioned, there are the ethical breaches of training models on other people's data, downloading movies, TV shows, images, essays, photographs, blog posts, and everything else and using them without asking or paying.

And then perhaps the biggest concern right now, which is that AI data centers use so much power that they're a climate liability. Some new AI data centers are using renewable energy, but right now, that can mean that they are sucking up the capacity of renewables, so the rest of us are forced to keep burning fossil fuels instead of switching over. This is something we can hardly afford.

"Deploying AI in many platforms and applications is computationally and financially expensive. As the technology matures, technology companies will likely shift away from broad deployments to more focused deployments for applications that benefit most," Professor Benjamin Lee, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, told Lifewire via email.

Free

This is why we need alternatives like Vivaldi. Vivaldi is a cross-platform web browser with a built-in mail client, news reader, and more. It's designed to do most of what you need without plugins, so it has built-in ad- and tracker-blockers, for example. It's based on the Chromium engine, and you can use most Chrome and Firefox plugins. If you're used to the options available in a browser like Safari, then you're also in for a treat because Vivaldi is stuffed full of features and customizations.

One does wonder how long any app maker or operating system vendor can hold out against this stuff, though. After all, there are many features that use "AI" that we really don't think about in that way. Any time you use Google Translate, for example, or whenever you use Apple's built-in predictive spelling or dictation, or whenever you click to remove a distracting object from the background of a photo, that's all machine learning, which is the last-gen name for AI.

What happens when site summaries or accessibility features like automatic image descriptions become standard in our browsers? It's going to be a lot harder to hold out when holding out starts to make your software product look dated. And even if the software offers a way to deactivate all its AI features, that's a little like expecting a vegan to buy their tofu from the local butcher.

It's a hard problem, but right now, it's great that we have options like Vivaldi and entire operating systems like Linux, where you can choose not to participate in the ruination of the web and the planet.