I’ve been digging into the rabbit hole for a few months. Been switching to Linux, FOSS everything I can, trying to go to smaller sites, the least dubious social media, VPN, trusted mail, etc etc
But lately I’ve been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it’s always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn’t this basically cancelling every effort I’ve made? (using it in the first place anyway)
I’m weak and it helps me, should I just throw my efforts out of the window and just say I don’t care about privacy anymore and use whatever everyone uses? (on one hand, I’ve found alternatives for almost everything, so I could keep on using those, but also, again, if I keep on using GPT on a regular basis, this is probably the worst threat the future has to offer in termes of privacy, so…I’m lost)
What are you even using GPT for? Is it literally just dictating your thoughts into typed words? There are so money speech-to-text things out there that are not AI… On a cursory search for something: https://fosspost.org/open-source-speech-recognition#Top_Open_Source_STTTTS_Systems
If you feel bad about it, then stop using it, period. Life isn’t easy, and the way that modern society tries to make convenience the number one goal is a crock of shit. Plan to put effort into your life, you will 1) get more out of it and 2) be less unprepared when situations arise. As a start, maybe practice typing while you talk and dictate your own thoughts into an offline app like Notepad++ or LibreOffice. You’ll have the exact same, identical end-result, except you will have done it all using your own abilities. Remember, the typewriter existed long before the computer, and certainly much longer than LLMs. Even Speech-to-Text systems have existed much longer than LLMs…
Or just do like you mentioned, fully embrace wilful ignorance and suppress whatever makes you feel uneasy about using GPT. Eventually, you’ll condition yourself into a perfect crop.
Either way, you need to pick a side and lean into it. Being in a tormented limbo will only make everything much worse.
I’ve tought about TTS options. I could probably make some kind of more private workaround with it, by using DDG chat AI, or whatever else that’s not the official ChatGPT app
What are you even using GPT for? Asking information, offering options, comparisons
First off, I can’t personally cast any stones: I sometimes use chatGPT so summarize a text or help me debug a code. I resisted the idea at first, but many of the other students of my promotion recommended it. Almost any time I asked someone for help, they either told me to use chatGPT or themselves prompted it my question. I try to do without it as much as I can, and I never prompt a queston without having spent several minutes looking for an answer online written by a human, but I have difficulties in several subjects and I’ve already failed my first semester, so it’s not easy to scorn a possible source of help when all else fails… I’ve installed locally a light weight version of Deepseek on my computer to get some of the benefits with a smaller climate footprint and staying in the Open Source side of the force, but so far I haven’t found it satisfactory, perhaps I’ll try a heavier version of the model.
But now, it seems you’re using it for something way different. You say it dictates what you think, do you have difficulty parsing your own thoughts? I don’t think you should feel guilty for it, if you need the help, but I do feel somewhat concerned. Large Language Models only learn and repeat patterns, I don’t think it’s a good tool for introspection, because it’s giving you more generic thoughts and only making it seem personal. It is common for people who enjoy reading to find it the text things they’ve thought themself without being able to word it and to feel a connection with the author. But in this case, you still know these words are from someone else’s mind. You see where the connection starts and where it ends. I think reading helps being good at putting one’s thoughts in words, and is healthier than using an llm for it. You should probably also write, even if you keep it for yourself. That way, you’ll be certain that these thoughts are your own.
You say it dictates what you think, do you have difficulty parsing your own thoughts?
Kind of Supposedly ADHD, anxiety, and other things Dictate via microphone helps in many ways for me
I don’t think it’s a good tool for introspection
I don’t really use it for introspection, always for information
Good thinking, thanks, I do still read tho, no worries (might not seem like it in my writing, english is not my first language). I’ve never been a writer, I’m usually into forms of expression that are more direct to me, like drawing and music
Large Language Models only learn and repeat patterns, I don’t think it’s a good tool for introspection, because it’s giving you more generic thoughts and only making it seem personal.
Worse, it’s doing that lazily. People think that just because it has a gigantic database of information that it’s able to parse all that information and put together summaries of that sum total of information, but what it does in reality is find the first solution it can cobble together from anonymous internet sources and present that as an “answer.”
Asking a generic code question about data structures is less likely to produce bad answers, since there’s little disagreement in how to implement them. They’re close to brute facts, and a wrong answer is rarely catastrophic. Asking it about psychology or philosophy, however, is prone to terrible answers, not just because there’s vast disagreement in those fields, but there’s also a lot of personal consideration when it comes to applying the information to individuals.
Privacy issues aside, don’t allow yourself to become too comfortable with leaning on AI for so much. Aside from the obvious things like AI info being flat out wrong sometimes and hallucinations, it’s going to train you into some bad habit holes during a vulnerable time. Look at how quickly we reach to map software for travel. It causes us to get mentally lazy.
If you are focused on using it and worried about privacy, you can host your own model like someone else mentioned, but you need a pretty beefy computer for it, and you could potentially host a model on the cloud (I know that breaks privacy and self-hosting rules a bit), but that can get expensive.
I’m a programmer and I’ve had to discipline myself with how I use Copilot. I try to lean on it for troubleshooting code I’ve written, and for doing tedious tasks that I know how to do but want to save time on.
I am definitely leaning on AI quite a bit lately. I ask and check sources now and then tho.
Side thinking, but I’m ot sure how we’ll see this problem in the future, when/if AI is “guaranteed” to basically never get things wrong. It’s the same with GPS/Maps software, since you’re talking about it. I’ve always been way worse than average to situate myself in space (? sorry, bad english probably), and GPS helps me immensely, me and my anxiety (and even then, I still manage to get stressed and miss things sometimes lol), it’s basically right most of the time as far as I know. Now IA being “always right” (let’s simplify) would have other consequences entirely, since it touches way more aspects of what we do as humans.
Not sure what to think from here, but yes, I’m definitely checking sources for important things, and restraining myself to not type every request I’m looking for into a chatbot.
You don’t actually have to have a beefy computer to self host. I know with deepseek there’s a 1.5b model which is optimized for low end hardware. I self hosted it on a desktop from 2012 and it worked alright. 8gb RAM, i5 processer, quad core. Was the GPU usage high? Yep. Still worked tho.
Obligatory: you’re not running deepseek 1.5B. You’re running some other distilled model which was finetuned by the deepseek folks
Wait, what? How does that work?
Deepseek 1.5B doesn’t exist. I don’t know why the Deepseek team named the models on Huggingface like this, but what is labelled as “Deepseek 1.5B” is actually not the OG Deepseek 70B model distilled to 1.5B, it’s a different model either trained or finetuned by the Deepseek team. My theory is some sort of intentional manipulation on their part so people stay confused on whether they are actually running the Deepseek model or not. There is a lot of commentary on this online, sorry I don’t have the links from the top of my head.
Oh wow, that’s awesome. I’m gonna have to try that model out. I have an old XFX 7950 I can try burning out lmao.
I didn’t tell ChatGPT who I am. I have a separate email address for it and everything.
Just keep in back of mind how everything is being linked and profiled behind the scenes. Without anything else, all they have to link you to other things is an IP address and an email. IP addresses aren’t terribly reliable these days. There may be supercookie/fingerprinting mischief going on though.
Do not use AI for Therapy. Just don’t do it. Don’t. Idk how much more clear I can be. That shit is NOT private. Please do not do this.
It was not for therapy, be reassured. See my post answer to Telorand @reddthat.com
Yes, you are leaking data, but don’t panik. First of all, your mental health here and now is important - without it you won’t have energy for other things. Next, It takes a lot of energy to de-google or de-corp and you don’t wan’t to ‘leak’ now, but in 6 months, you’ll have your own private/foss talking AI assistant, and it will help you cut the ties to the last corporation then.
So, soon you’ll be more ‘invisible’ for the corps, and maybe you can live with the spying/manipulation for a moment longer ? Not sure how long it takes for their AI to find you anyway, but at least the removed have to work for it…
Alternatively, get a free account at Groq (also have ‘whisper’ stt), or sambanova and install/use open-webui for talking. These new hardware corps don’t train AI on free user interactions, and they probably don’t sell your information - yet. There are other methods for p2p sharing of AI resources, but they may not provide quality high enough or with all modalities.
I don’t think the AI is the problem here. I think you should see a real professional therapist.
I did, but that’s not really the subject. I’m not taking GPT as a therapist by the way, I may have been misunderstood because english is not my first language. But I’m not sharing mental health things with it.
In any case, I think the problem I’m feeling can be real for many people that are not in mental state anyway. But I totally see why you would say that, thanks.
Word, Riggs. 😆
On top of a therapist, a group session that works on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy principles or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy principles also helps because it puts you in a situation around other real people who are dealing with similar issues as yourself.
The problem (in the USA at least) is affording access to either of those things might be more complicated.
This is the actual best suggestion in the thread, though. Self-hosting an LLM is nice and all but what this poor soul really needs is therapy with a human.
I honestly am not sure on the privacy of it but if you really need a useful tool that’s ai driven I tend to trust perplexity.ai for general questions and research but I agree with one of the others just run ollama if you can
The obsession with privacy can be taken to an extreme where it’s a negative for your mental health. You can sacrifice a little privacy for another important benefit. 100% privacy is either not possible or practical, so don’t let it stress you out. I’d be more concerned that AI might lead you down a wrong path, but you’re an adult, use your own judgement.
100% is not possible. Everything else is an illusion.
This. It’s all incremental to me. No I can’t be 100% free of big tech and surveillance, etc etc - but how much of my data has Google not gotten since I started paying for private email 5 years ago or so?
(Not much cause everyone else refuses to leave Gmail behind 😂 but all I can do is keep moving myself in that direction.)
I feel like the “getting into privacy” journey for a lot of people tends to look like a bell curve - you start off with a few apps and minor tweaks to protect you from the worst online privacy invasions, and then it gradually builds and builds until you become the sort of person that has all their cat pictures on an air-gapped encrypted server hidden in a cupboard somewhere while you use SearX to find the best mask that will confuse facial recognition cameras, and then after a while you break through and just go back to using a few apps and tweaks to protect from the worst of it again.
I get that, but the problem with this kind of AI is, I feel like I’m sacrificing a lot, not a little.
Don’t make a bigger deal out of it than it is. Nothing bad is going to happen.
What’s wrong with https://lmstudio.ai/ or https://jan.ai/ for offline, private, FOSS use?
Go set up an ollama instance and melt your worries away. Data in your hands once again.
However, you should also learn some restraint. Privacy and security aren’t an all or nothing battle. Everyone has some holes in their armor, they need them to breathe.
that’s a nice way to view it
most security planning workshops start with this statement:
“it is unreasonable as well as impossible to try and protect against every threat out there. there is no magic app, website, service that will solve everything. security is a mindset, and taking the time to understand what you want to protect and why will serve you better than any application.”
Chill out my friend. We use FOSS and privacy respecting things to make our lives easier and more enjoyable . Don’t stress yourself. If you need to do something then do it. No need to feel bad.
Something is always better than nothing. You’ve done so much in terms of better privacy and using FOSS so you’re doing great and better than most people. Just live your life and improve things step by step.
Thanks In a way I did still change a lot of habits. This on the other does feel like giving up a huge fight and making my brain think that I actually don’t care about privacy/Foss at all, I’m usually not a “all or nothing” type of person, but it’s a bit hard to wrap my head around this time
Dude, it’s all good. I doubt anyone has entirely removed intrusion from their lives. I’ve been the nut in my family, friends and work environments (not complaining, I actually love being that person) on privacy and cybersecurity. I still keep my Gmail account, the one I used to buy all my movies when I thought Google wasn’t evil. My kids love using the Lenovo Google Assistant screens. I have 2 Chromecast with Google TV with the account I mentioned (my TVs do not connect to the internet). I play on my PS5 with my account and use my credit card (none of that temp credit card or cash or crypto), but I haven’t used my PayPal in years (but still have it). I buy shit on Amazon (it’s so convenient).
The point being, do what you can to safeguard your privacy as much as possible, as long as it does not affect your mental health. You need Facebook for whatever reason? You can minimize the invasion, and still use it. (Full disclosure, I fucking hate Meta, so I don’t use any of its platforms, or even their open source language model). I’m on GrapheneOS in my phone, use Linux exclusively in my personal life, but I’m picking up a surface pro 11th Gen for work this Friday. I need my job, everything is windows based, and it’s just getting harder to use Ms shit from Linux effectively. So, I use Windows. I have a good job, get paid well, so, I have to decide if that’s worth some of my privacy.
Live life man, enjoy, be happy, then worry about the rest.
host your own AI using: https://ollama.com/
this paired with “AnythingLLM” is pretty powerful, and you dont have to worry about data being sent anywhere
I have been suggested to self host in the past. But as I’m concerned for ecology, and let’s be a honest, a bit of my money too, I’ve thought that self hosting, meaning having the PC always on, was not a good thing. So I left the dilemma in this state, not knowing how “bad” this would actually be in terms of electric consumption, and if it was worth the trade with privacy or not.
That’s pretty dependant on hardware. If you host small stuff , like a pihole or something, that can be done relatively cheaply, by using a micro-PC or a Raspberry Pi. Some services don’t need to be always-on either, you only need stuff all the time if it’s mission-critical, otherwise you can turn stuff on and off as necessary, for power-saving purposes. Self-hosting doesn’t necessitate a huge rack and switches, or even your big gaming rig, my favorite thing to do with old laptops is throw Debian on it and find something I’d like to self-hosting from this list.
I actually got it to run reasonably on a mini PC in a docker container, but my setup also lets me use CPU power as a psuedo GPU.
Llamacpp, Koboldcpp, and TabbyAPI are also popular local backends for local AI. SillyTavern or RisuAi are good frontends for a chat/RP style experience. Or LM Studio for a simple, all in one solution.
I get it, I’ve been there, but there is just no point in hating yourself because random big company wants to make money off of you, so they shove convenience in your face. Just do you best to align yourself to your values. Doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s ok if it’s always work in progress. Don’t put your life and wellbeing on hold.
Also duckduckgo.com/aichat is a thing.
Spend $500, buy a beefy used GPU and run Whisper + Mistral small. It’ll be a bit slow but now you can maintain your privacy on your own hardware! Best of both worlds.
Look for GPUs with more memory. My choice is the AMD 7900 XTX with 24Gb.
Yeah unfortunately ROCM is shit last I heard
Why?
But lately I’ve been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it’s always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
Do you mean you use it to brain dump your thoughts and things like that?
If so, have you considered simply… writing stuff down with a pen on paper? Aka, journaling.
I’ve been doing that for, well, almost all all my live (started as little boy, I’m now well into my 50s) and it has always been tremendous help to better understand whatever is going on in my head/happening around me/with other people/the world.
Pen and paper journaling is also 100% not online, unless you want it to be. And it’s cheap, when it’s not completely free ;)
Sorry, lots of posts to answer to, but I’ve basically answered yours in another post I suppose (Telorand @reddthat.com’s post)
I really, really don’t understand how people see LLMs as the only options for stuff like this…
Literally, written language and even typewriters have been a part of human history for a relatively long amount of time compared to how long simple computers have been a part of human history. I wonder if OP is very young and part of a generation that doesn’t even know what landlines are.
I really, really don’t understand how people see LLMs as the only options for stuff like this…
We can’t tell that is what the OP thinks and I would rather not assume anything. But if that was the case, I would imagine OP is from this generation that seems to have completely lost connection with the written word. It’s a huge loss for them (and for the whole society), a dramatic one even but one can’t realize how tragic it is, and how much they are losing, if they don’t have an opportunity to experiment what it’s like to be writing (and reading).
To the OP, if you’re wondering about writing in a journal (paper or digital, it’s up to you but be assured it can be private), feel free to come say hello in the !journaling@sh.itjust.works. I’m the admin there and if there isn’t much activity going on, I’m pretty sure this kind of situations may be of interest to way more people than we imagine. At the very least, if you have questions I will do my best to answer them, hopefully others would chime in too ;)
Edit to clear: not being able to read/write long-form content anymore is a tragic loss for younger generations, and that will cost dear to most of them because the few that will have learned to master those ‘low-tech’ activities, and to focus their attention, will outperform the others and they’re the ones that will get the all the rewards we associate with ‘winning’. But if they’re the ones that will pay, for the most part they’re not at fault. It is us, the adults that were supposed to be educating them, that are responsible. We failed. Hard. Now, they will pay the price.
Not saying it’s the only option. But it certainly is one, and well, technology evolve, and lures us in seductive ways into giving up on efforts and all…that’s the problem I’m fighting against
