I’ve been disappointed to see the ongoing addition of various elements to Newsblur that involve LLMs. I am firmly disinterested in “features” that make use of a tool that’s known to be vague, imprecise, and occasionally outright factually wrong, not to mention a huge waste of resources to create its outputs. I know that when some new features in a piece of software go live, they’re enabled by default – andI don’t want to have to pay attention to every new update announcement in order to know I must go into my settings and turn off another new addition. Could you please implement an option where a user can toggle a setting to have all LLM-related features, both current and future, completely disabled for their account? That way I won’t have to worry about what might be added in the future without me noticing.
You can disable any individual LLM feature you like. I’m not making a “no new changes ever” button. NewsBlur has always been, since 2009, a “news reader with intelligence”. There are no plans to turn NewsBlur into something different than it always has been, which is a way to pare down the massive firehose of RSS into something transparently manageable.
I think it’s clear this user isn’t asking for a ‘no new changes ever’ button.
Whether they’re a fan of LLMs or not, they’ve raised valid points about their unreliability and expense. It’d be interesting to know NewsBlur’s perspective on these issues, and / or how it plans to support its userbase that doesn’t want to use AI-driven technology (if at all).
I would also be interested to know if the future of NewsBlur’s development is going to be so intertwined with LLM tech that avoiding it would hypothetically need a ‘no new changes ever’ button.
Is there a guide to disabling these features? With notion, I just sent them an email and they turned off AI for me. And I love the new Firefox option to globally turn off these types of features.
I think it’s reductive for someone to say “No AI ever,” because you’re transparent about using it as part of your workflow, and obviously there are lots of subscribers who love it. I’m just someone who isn’t interested for various reasons and would just as soon save the resources.
Yes, like how Firefox added a master switch for all current and future LLM features. This way both the people who don’t mind being opted into these, and the people who never want to engage with any LLMs can be satisfied.
The case for individual opt-outs over a master switch comes down to this: every LLM feature in NewsBlur is already off by default or scoped to a single action you take. Ask AI only runs when you click Ask AI on a story. The text and image classifiers only run on feeds where you set them up. Story summaries only generate when you open a story and request one. There is no background LLM work happening on your account unless you asked for it. That would be way too expensive! A master toggle would mostly be a toggle over features that are already inert for you.
The piece I want to push back on is the framing that NewsBlur is drifting toward AI. The last two things I shipped have nothing to do with LLMs at all:
- Widely Read Stories and Long Reads
Most of what I build is still RSS, fetching, classifiers, sharing, notifications, and reading experience work. The LLM features get attention because they are new and loud, but they are a small slice of what ships.
So I am going to keep individual opt-outs as the answer. If there is a specific feature that is showing up somewhere you do not want it, tell me which one and where, and I will make sure the opt-out for it is obvious and sticky. That is a fix I am happy to make.