Audacity has added AI audio editing capabilities thanks to Intel’s free OpenVINO plugins. These plugins add AI-powered noise suppression, speech transcription, music generation and remixing, and music separation to the freeware sound editor and are available for download today.
AI, like cloud computing, is just a layman’s term for something else. You will not be able to stem the tide of language changing. It just means machine learning now. Just like how cloud computing is just a term for computing in a k8s cluster in someone’s data center.
Neural nets have been a part of AI ever since the term was coined 70 years ago. The one thing one could complain about is that the term may be narrowing to that specific approach.
Strictly, neural nets are a specific kind of ML and ML is a specific kind of AI. The term AI seems to have gone out of fashion in academia, though.
I never understood the opposition to anonymized telemetry. While adding an entire network stack for it is certainly quite atrocious, there's no problem with the principle I can see.
Some people prefer to not have their every action watched and observed by some anonymous Big brother.
The people who do not get that are the people who profit from the watching, and the people that are, best case, inconsiderate of the desires and feelings of other people.
It is not normal nor is it natural to claim ownership of other people's activity.
It is normal and natural to wish to exist without being observed. Privacy is a fundamental human right and companies are taking advantage of the fact that it is not legally enforced.
Hopefully the laws will catch up and make it so that each and every individual opportunity to directly observe a person must be explicitly approved beforehand with a set time limit on the observation, and that all telemetry must be made publically available and transparent, not only during the original acquisition of data but also in each and every single usage of that data after the fact.
It is only fair after all that should accompany wish to observe you that they must also be equally observed.
This is an odd place to grand stand. I'm glad you have ideals, but the fact is Audacity was looking to gather industry standard telemetry data (basic system information and crashes) as an opt-in system. This information is extremely important in fixing bugs and prioritising developer resources.
It's pretty clear from my argument that I believe that it is entirely legitimate and unproblematic for everyone to collect basic data like system information and crashes. I'm not making an exception for Audacity, I'm broadly accepting this behaviour.