I say this as someone who frequently uses generative ai, and actively chooses to pay for the service.
Fuck openai.
This company has utterly failed to fulfill their mission statement, and they will be unable to make right by humanity until ALL software they have created is available to the public as FOSS (free and open source software). Openai claimed that this is exactly what they were going to do, and then they just didn’t. So fuckem.
If you don’t mind my asking, how do you not have a moral objection to using AI? With everything we know about it, the theft, the benefit to the technocrats, the environmental toll, I could not bring myself to wave away those issues. Not to mention the power imbalance of this tech being controlled by the ruling class, looking to eliminate people’s livelihoods for the sake of profit. What do you use it for? I feel like we should be boycotting them en masse.
The problem is ownership, financialisation, blitzscaling, growth hacking, betting against us with our pension funds and buying our government with the profits.
Disown all intellectual property, destroy enclosers of the common.
This isn’t an AI problem, it is just another facet of our vampiric elites perpetually disempowering us, marginalising us. This is the all-encompassing everything-problem.
This will continue until the root of tge problem has been pulled out and burned.
I pick my battles.
If I took a hard stance of not engaging with any business that did things I morally object to, I’d be forced to be a self-sufficient hermit in the woods.
Have you heard of ollama? You can run deepseek and stuff locally super easy. I know it’s not a complete replacement, but it feels nice to use an LLM guilt free. I’ve compared the 14b distilled model from deepseek vs the paid version of ChatGPT and it made me cancel my account.
What do you use to run it locally? If there was something that could use speech to text reliably to be able to use a open source option, I consider switching.
FWIW speech to text works really well on Apple stuff.
I’m not exactly sure what info you’re looking but: my gaming PC is headless and sits in a closet. I run ollama on that and I connect to it using a client called “ChatBox”. It’s got a gtx 3060 which fits the whole model, so it’s reasonably fast. I’ve tried the 32b model and it does work but slowly.
Honestly, ollama was so easy to setup, if you have any experience with computers I recommend giving it a shot. (Could be a great excuse to get a new gpu 😉)
Yeah, I think the Apple speech to text is pretty decent, but I think on ChatGPT they use the whisper API to return the text and it just seems to be a lot more reliable, especially when it comes to understanding random words in context
How much VRAM do you have on the 3060 to be able to fit the whole thing on the GPU?
True. Honestly apples software is just getting worse by the day. It’s sad.
It’s a version with 12gb of vram. I use it to game though. If you want a real GPU for this, I hear the Tesla P40 is the best.
I would prefer to run my ais locally, but my brain glazes over if I see github. I found a a program called “gpt4all”, but it’s very limited in what models it can run, and what I could get just wasn’t as good for my use case as openai’s 4o model. Also, being able to generate images in the same conversation as text work is a feature that I’m fairly certain no other ai model can do (yet).
I think whats really happening behind the scenes is that the model you’re talking to makes a function call to another model that generates the image.
I haven’t seen it either so if you want that and don’t want to code it might be best to stick with paid, but something like that could easily exist somewhere else.
I bet you’re right, but the fact that I never see it is a feature worth paying for, especially for a smooth-brain like myself.
If you need to use AI, be aware that there are MANY free models and training options. No reason to be locked into proprietary service.
There is nothing ethic about the OpenAi, they stole books, videos, music and art. Their whole business is based on robbery. Its fucking shame that not only microsoft, but also apple is using their tech in their operating systems. Fucking shame.
I wonder how Nintendo will react when it’s their turn 😆
At this point they are making it clear they are nothing more than thugs and hucksters; and that they have the right to stole everything on the internet to push their lip products. Fuck open ai an all of their cronies.
Worse, it’s cruel indifference.
Oh no, they didn’t protect a rich corporations profits! How cruel!!!
Is this fashion comeback ? Style transfer was popular 10 years ago.
There’s a word for it that describes the perpetrators well: BARBARIC. (and still, might will never equal right !)
We already have AI yet people are still illiterate and misspell words in the title. Really makes you think
How dare they not respect intellectual property 😢😢😭😭😭😭
Seriously? With everything going on this is what people want to rage about? How disconnected do you have to be?
Ugh, why are they quoting that blowhard David Gerard
Edit: Lotta David Gerard fans here
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
These critiques are getting insufferable. They’re cute dumb filters.
So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are all running on the same script which boils down to “rules for thee, not for me.”
Being a hypocrite is simply showing others you have the power to be a hypocrite and all they can do is get mad and stomp their feet. It’s why the right wing loves to “trigger liberals.” It’s not even about actual politics or religion anymore, it’s just simply “might makes right.”
These are expressions of power, plain and simple. They should always be viewed as such.
I mean, so many companies pirated tons of materials to train their LLMs and they are making way more money than the guys at the Pirate Bay ever did. It’s almost like because the guys at the Pirate Bay were making small potatoes money that they were worth going after. It’s almost like if you crime big enough, the world will just pat you on the back and say “good job” instead.
Meta was literally caught downloading Anna’s Archive and the widely used by nearly every AI company books3 corpus was everything from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Why do they get different treatment? They are leveraging the same pirated works to make money, which was the whole argument for throwing the Pirate Bay admins behind bars for laws that didn’t actually exist in their home country, that they were profiting from piracy. The LLM companies just are making way more money so it’s let go for some reason.
It’s a power play, to show little people can’t get away with it, but if you’ve got millions in venture capital at your back, you can do whatever the fuck you want and people will praise you for it.
We’re living through the return of the robber barons. This time, however, they can implant their thoughts directly into every single person’s hands at any instant. That’s why your point is the most salient, most important, and most downplayed
I agree on the double standard. I also think there’s an element of Cory Doctorow’s point that “it’s not a crime of we do it with an app.”
Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we’re not criminals, we’re disrupting stagnant markets!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/
It’s basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws
But they don’t have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give “advice” to the cartel members about “optimal pricing.”
This is the real sick stuff, same with RealPage. They’re just offering a service that could allow the businesses they serve to collude, but because they’re just doing it through a third party service it’s suddenly not collusion.
Doctorow pretty spot on as usual. I’m glad he’s come a long way, because I actually kind of disliked his writing on Boing Boing in the early 2000’s because he often got some simple facts wrong. He’s much more thorough and rigorous now.
This kind of price-fixing was central to the enforcement actions of the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the FTC, and their investigations and actions inspired state AGs and private parties to bring their own antitrust suits.
Saddest part of that article. We had someone trying to end this shit, and you brainwashed fuckers hated him for it.
Steal $5 and they shoot you down in the street.
Steal $5,000 they throw you in jail.
Steal $500,000 and they give you a fine.
Steal $50,000,000 and they name a building after you.
Steal $50,000,000,000 and they make you king.
White collar crime is always ignored as long as it doesn’t rock the boat too much or isn’t stealing money from the wealthy.
In our current society, little people can get away with it. I can take whatever style I want and train a model on it. There’s already many ghibli ressources in the open source scene, and a lot of them date from 2 years ago.
This whole situation is rage bait to manipulate the population into cheering for new copyright laws so politicians get little push back when they start writing pro-corporate laws regarding AI.
Did you buy the Ghibli movies you trained on or did you pirate them? Because OpenAI has argued that they are allowed to pirate and no one else.
Mostly youtube, reddit and image search. I guess I could just record a Netflix stream if I needed the whole movie. I guess recording a Netflix stream is pirating? Probably easier with a torrent.
What does it matters? I don’t think pirating is unethical especially when it’s not even redistribution but transformative. Openai has never stopped me from pirating or even asked me to stop. Not sure what you mean with “no one else”.
You ever ask yourself if the memes made from movie scenes used pirated media?
Yes recording at Netflix stream is pirating. That you got away with it doesn’t mean you couldn’t be sued for tens of thousands of someone found out.
You don’t think it’s unethical but it is illegal in the US and people have been sued for thousands of dollars. This is still going on today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/isp-sued-by-record-labels-agrees-to-identify-100-users-accused-of-piracy/
OpenAI has said they need to violate copyright. But they didn’t say that the law should be changed. They want an exemption for themselves.
I’m mostly talking about being able to train on copyrighted content. This is on me though, I got mixed up. That’s what I meant in my first comment.
If you think someone can train a model on legally obtained data (Google images, YouTube, internet archive), then that is fair.
Personally, I think using pirated or at least bought content that is ripped (Netflix, DVDs) should be exempt (for everyone obviously, not just OpenAI.) Some data is already behind huge mega corps like record labels, Hollywood, publishing houses, etc. OpenAI can afford the cost but the little guys will be screwed when it comes to SOTA.
It’s also worth noting that most current lawsuits are aimed at how the data is used and not how it’s sourced if I’m not mistaken. The laws coming from these lawsuits won’t be used to bolster anti-piracy laws but copyright laws instead, targeting fair use and transformative clauses imo.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
June 15, 2009
Using existing data on recordings and books we obtain a point estimate of around 15 years for optimal copyright term with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years
Some of us have been waiting for copyright laws to be amended downward for 16 years now.
I’m not promoting that corporations should get a free pass, I just want them to be held to the same standards they held the Pirate Bay to if we’re gonna pretend that current copyright laws are good, since the centerpiece of the court case against the Pirate Bay was that they were making money from what they did. OpenAI is making shitloads of money from what they did.
But I’m all for shortening copyright, but not getting rid of it. Reforms don’t have to be pro-corporate slop.
What pirate bay is doing isn’t exactly transformative. I pirate most of my media and can’t say I’m not for better copyright laws and a better treatment of pirate bay, I just think the situations are different.
I don’t think saying “if pirate bay is illegal, so should training ai without compensations” is exactly fair. (I wish the actual people contributing could be compensated, but how it’s set up, we would be giving a few companies a monopoly while compensating mostly data aggregators.)
Reforms don’t have to be pro-corporate slop.
Sadly, the media and most of the population is practically begging for it. When you couple that with the pressure exerted by record companies, publishing houses, etc, it is clear those are the reforms we get if any.
If you download a movie from a torrent site, you have committed an illegal act in the US. It doesn’t matter if you watch the movie and then write a fanfiction based on the movie. It’s the copying that’s illegal. It seems clear from OpenAI’s statements that they torrented the data they used to build their models.
OpenAI picked Studio Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach.
I highly doubt it. They picked it because the Ghibli style is very popular among users. There’s also no reason to believe that it violates “democratic values”. Since it’s popular, the general population is voting that they LIKE it, not that they oppose it.
Downvote me all you like, but this is trying to put a lot of malice where the simpler explanation is just “money”.
Money and malice are not a dichotomy. I would say most malice is for monetary reasons.
Of course they aren’t, but the cartoonish levels of moustache-twirling villainy described here are unlikely to be real.
They thought it was cool. They knew it would drive usage and make money. They shit on intellectual property. There is no other explanation needed, nor is it sensible.
It’s the “you stole my style” artists attacking artists all over again. And digital art isn’t real att/cameras are evil/cgi isn’t real art all over with a more organic and intelligent medium.
The issue is the same as it has always been. Anything and everything is funneled to the rich and the poor blame the poor who use technology, because anthropocentric bias makes it easier to vilify than the assholes building our cage around us.
The apple “ecosystem” has done much more damage than AI artists, but people can’t seem to comprehend how. Also Disney and corpos broke copyright so that its just a way for the rich to own words and names and concepts, so that the poor can’t use them to get ahead.
All art is a remix. Disney only became successful using other artists hard work in the Commons. Now the Commons is a century more out of grasp, so only the rich can own the artists and hoard the growth of art.
Also which artists actually have the time and money to litigate? I guess copyright does help some nepo artists.
Nepotism is the main way to earn your right to invest into becoming an artist that isn’t fatiguing towards collapse of life.
But let’s keep yelling at the technology for being evil.
yeah yeah you ai bros keep crying about how useless artists are but you keep gobbling up datasets full of them! Hypocrites everyone of you! You need them! You crave them to spit more and more useless derivative trash.
Try comprehending what he wrote instead of spewing insults, it might make you smarter. He’s clearly not an AI bro.
Yeah it’s not like this is the only way to generate the style, it’s relatively simple to even do it locally. It’s just popular
Yeah the text makes many freestyle assumptions, although the overall sentiment is correct that these big companies and especially egocentric billionaires do stuff to trigger others simply for power display. I believe the text linked about it being a distraction for the new round of funding is the real reason.
no reason to believe it violates “democratic values”
In my country the law is one of the pillars of democracy, but you do you 👍
You’re implying that this is against the law without ever bothering to prove the implication.
The law very, VERY often violates the democratic choices of the people in the United States. That’s what you get when you do FPTP voting schemes.
