A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things, too.
Privacy would be the main concern. Every single one of your words, documents, pictures will probably end up in some large database over at OpenAI. I don’t like that at all. And as a company for example, it might be against the law to share some information about clients with third parties.
Then you don’t get any of the freedoms we got with Free Software. It’s a service you rely on with very little opportunities to customize, or look inside and tinker. There is little control for the user whatsoever. Additionally we already had companies cease service. So it might become unavailable tomorrow, which is a bad thing if you’re attached to it, invested or built things around it.
And since “the internet is for porn”… We also have a noteworthy community doing those kinds of things. And well… go ahead and ask the big services to generate a lewd story. Most of them even refuse to write a murder mystery story for me, instead they’ll lecture me on how it is not ethical to murder someone. So that would be use-cases where local AI outperforms any of the market leaders.
Personally, I’m a bit opposed to the entire concept of letting other people’s algorithms dictate my life. I don’t want to rely on them. I also don’t want them to pick the bias for my perspective on the world. The algorithms in social media are dwarfed by how dangerous it’s gonna be once people rely on AI more and more. And it gets to choose which information to show and which to drop. What kind of bias to introduce in summaries etc. Teach people how to think. And I already don’t like the way all big AI chatbots talk to me with a lot of emojis and in a “Explain like I’m 5 yo” way.
So to go back to the original question… I think the more “useful” AI is, the more reasons there are to retain some control yourself. What do you think?