I’ve been opting out of the internet at large. It started a few years back just disconnecting from social media, but as AI has begun to pollute everything and enshittification ruins everything, I’m just kinda done with it all.
I’ve been enjoying Lemmy, and I’m hoping Lemmy doesn’t turn into an AI circle jerk.
As a result I’ve been building out my server with services I want to use that I control so I’m not trapped by enshittification or inundated with AI where I don’t want it.
With all that being said, I know AI is here to stay. My biggest problem with AI is these companies gleefully gobbling up our data, our art, our words, our creativity, using it to feed and train, and to make billions, while we get nothing. It would be one thing if all these generative models were open source and freely available for everyone to use and benefit from, but that’s not the case. I know there are open source models, but the big ones are all paywalled and in many ways being weaponized against us.
At some point I hope generative AI becomes a boon to society. Right now, I’m too cynical to believe it will. I feel like it’s just going to make things worse for the majority of people.
Ollama is actually pretty decent at stuff now, and comparable in speed to chat gpt on a sort of busy day. I'm enjoying having a constant rubber duck to bounce ideas off.
If your concern is that we're "not getting anything" in exchange for the training data AI trainers have gleaned from your postings, then those open-source AIs are what you should be taking a look at. IMO they're well worth the trade.
I've been playing with a locally installed instance of big agi really like the UI but it's missing the RAG part. I'm also cobbling my own together for fun and not profit to try to stay relevant in these hard times. Langchain is some wild stuff.