Dear readers, as you a probably aware, it’s now perfectly acceptable in the USA for an AI vendor to plagiarise any published creative works for it’s own use and profit.
This comment from Bruce Perens about AI companies in a recent article on The Register…
“I think that AI is always plagiarism,” he says. “When you train the model, you’re training the model with other people’s copyrighted stuff. And what the AI does is mix and match and output a combination of what was input. We have to consider that. How do we compensate the people whose data was used to train the model? Should we be training it with open source software? I don’t think so. But it does more than that. It reads people’s websites. It reads the whole of Wikipedia. Nobody on the input side is being compensated fairly for the output. So that’s a big question we have to resolve.”
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/27/bruce_perens_post_open/
Meanwhile the parasitical large donators have spoken, and only large corporations with legal teams (e.g. Disney) are allowed to have enforced copyrighted works in the United States for now.
My own humble contributions to humanity will cease to be at this point.
If you have any self-consideration and privacy concerns, and you’d like to avoid AI -infested apps, including any Google and Microsoft products, not to omit Meta, then look to Free Open-Source Software (FOSS).
For an office suite, LibreOffice is a free download and works well. Collabora has been around for a while and is supporting them. There’s a Collabora plugin for Nextcloud, which also has a plugin for Android phones, so you can have a backup and file-sharing solution on your own hosting account and get to choose who sees your stuff, Webhosts that have software installers such as Softalicious offer installs of Nextcloud in a few clicks.
For browsing, try Firefox or Seamonkey with the NoScript and uBlock Origin plugins to start, then feel free to add Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, Disconnect etc. Vivaldi has built-in adblockers and is based on Chrome/Blink, in case you need that compatibility.
If you think that Apple isn’t collecting all your data for a profitable reason, my best wishes and condolences to you.
MX Linux or Linux Mint will install on nearly any X86 computer, including older ones, and will run alongside the Windows you’re running now so you can try it out. I had linked MX here, but they’ve opted for a Cloudflare scheme for their site, which makes me less inclined to recommend them, even though the XFCE version is quite useful if you can get past Cloudflare myrmidon to their download page.
Now there’s Asahi Linux for the Apple M processors.