Google scanned millions of books and made them available online. Courts ruled that was fair use because the purpose and interface didn’t lend itself to actually reading the books in Google books, but just searching them for information. If that is fair use, then I don’t see how training an LLM (which doesn’t retain the exact copy of the training data at least in the vast majority of cases) isn’t fair use. You aren’t going to get an argument from me.

I think most people who will disagree are reflexively anti AI, and that’s fine. But I just haven’t heard a good argument that AI training isn’t fair use.

I’ve used it just to access Bing Chat, which has become my go to AI chatbot for a couple of reasons: 1) you theoretically get access to gpt 4 without paying 20 dollars a month, 2) it cites it’s sources, and 3) it can create images via DALLE from within the chat (which is handy, you can chat with the AI to help you think of an image prompt, the just say “ok make an image based on that description”). Other then that, i use Firefox at home. At work our choices are chrome or edge, so I use edge because of bing chat and I kind of like the layout better. It feels like choosing between buying something from Amazon or Walmart, which terrible corporation do I hate more in a given moment.

I know literally nothing about computers and I’ve been daily driving Linux for well over a decade. I just use Ubuntu and I’ve been pretty much using all the default settings, apart from some customization here and there. There was a time years ago when I wanted to learn and tinker, but in reality I never learned to use the command line for more than running updates (I still sudo apt-get update cause it makes me feel like hackerman).

My point is, Linux is super easy to just set up and run. If you want to learn more, there’s plenty of opportunities for that. But it’s not something to be intimidated by at all. A lot of the community is enthusiasts (who’ve I’ve found extremely helpful back when I used to have problems) so you’ll hear more jargon in these spaces. But I’m sure there are tons of others like me that use Linux just fine day to day without understanding a ton about computers.

This is a really interesting idea, I’m definitely considering it. I’m already giving on lemmy.world patreon more than your plans cost. I have two questions. First, just from a business perspective, how do you think about differentiating yourself from the donation based servers? Is there something of extra value that people get from your instance and service that they can’t get elsewhere?

I’m also interested in your moderation and federation policies. I think a potential barrier here is paying upfront for a year only to disagree with a federation decision down the line. Maybe you could have different instances with different policies? Like one that is federated with threads, one that isn’t, one that’s federated with hexbear one that isn’t. Maybe that’s overly complicated once you start adding up all the different combinations that people come up with (personally I’m fine with threads, meh on hexbear, and a no on explodingheads).