Getting away from Ai, ideas and my experiences so far.

[Tadpole]

Hey it's Tadpole!
Haven't been here in a while between balancing school and work, but I am absolutely fed up with the current internet (as I know most of us are). It doesn't feel like the internet is a tool to help people anymore, and is rather a tool for corporations to control and profit off of people. With the massive pushes of AI and the 'convenience' it brings, I am becoming jaded. I feel like a shitty millennial parent pointing at the youth and criticizing their phone use, but honestly I don't think that is that awful of a thing to be at this point in time. The energy use of AI focused search engines is horrifying and wasteful, and paired with the absolutely ocean boiling levels of energy used to create AI images, I am just kind of done with being a part of that ecosystem.
I am an environmental science student, I feel like it should be partially my responsibility to keep things like my internet habits and learning habits sustainable for not just myself and my mental well being, but the world at large.
I have begun using duck duck go lite for my searches. It feels like with the amount of money going into ai tech right now, so many small search engines are integrating AI into their models for profit incentive. I understand why, but I cannot get behind it personally.
I have gotten mostly off of social media, and have begun prioritizing my personal relationships and I feel like a part of me has begun to heal.
I am worried about our future. It feels like talk of AI has dwarfed the environmental concerns we are facing at current moment.
Do you have any ideas on ethical internet use and avoiding AI when possible? I'd like to hear other people's take on it.
        

[Yoylecake420]

Have you considered Marginalia Browser? Startpage?

If you truly want to get away from AI, just get off the internet and find books to read or ask others. Sometimes you're better off using older forms of research. Or you can check this link:
Hope this helps, and please tell others about it.

[DiffydaDude]

If you want a good search engine then you should use searxng, its pretty good, its like a bunch of search engines in one search engine and it also has tabs for different stuff.

[candycanearter07]

I personally am on the side of "AI is terrible but I do like laughing at the stupid stuff it makes but I'd never personally use it". I'm sure my opinion would've been different as a kid, but as an artist and very slightly writer now, the thought of passing off someone else's work as my own, even if I "technically" "made" the "art" or "writing" "myself" by using one of those tools, horrifies me. And not to mention all the inaccuracies with getting facts wrong, the hallucinations, answers changing every time, it's just a complete nightmare.

[JINSBEK]

The subject of LLMs and the environmental impact is a curious one for me. I cannot identify any of my own personal activity being relevant to these considerations, aside from using Upscayl to increase the resolution and definition of old wallpapers I have. The resources required are negligible compared to me actually rendering a video I created, or a piece of music, or me personally painting a substitute wallpaper or manually painstakingly retouching the low-resolution wallpaper myself. Especially compared to the latter two cases, I believe using an LLM is by leagues the more environmentally friendly action.

When it comes to the environmental impact of my own actions, I've been working to reduce the immense footprint of streaming --and here's another article on it--by downloading local, offline copies of media for playback.

With regards to limiting the incursion of LLMs on my daily life, I actually have no problem using Bing/Copilot asking it questions to get a cursory understanding of a subject and leads to further references to research (this was the original conceit of the Ask Jeeves search engine from 1997, which I loved the concept of). But I detest the slop now being recommended to me in YouTube. So that's pushing me to discover music via Soulseek (thanks for the recommendation, @DiffydaDude!), which is probably also more environmentally friendly to do than browsing SoundCloud or Bandcamp, for the same reasons above.

[DiffydaDude]

@JINSBEK

No problem, also, I do use an image upscaler called bigjpg.com. Its actually super helpful for me and ive been using it for quite a while.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I'm mainly around in amateur video game dev and music circles; beside of this, I read the Wikipedia and some newspapers. I basically encounter no AI stuff, and if I do, I take it as a marker that the source doesn't care about their own work, as I find the results always a) easily recognizable for what they are and b) artistically extremely boring, probably a result of the core mechanic of AI (that takes always a rather likely way to go on, based on the input prompt). There are a few glorious exceptions (I liked, to name one, the game "Shell Song"). If we set algorithms that work behind the curtains alike (although I rarely use sites that use them these days. I use Youtube, but I don't use its "explore" functionalities, and use a mixture of SearchXNG and Startpage), my exposure to AI is rather low. I see much more people who complain about it  .

I don't think that anything worsened through AI, if we ignore the environmental impact*. Corporate BS is still corporate BS, and small time artists who imitate corporate BS did the same thing before, the only difference is that they now got weird-looking, uncanny, over-realistic images and wall-of-texts with abysmal niveau.

I might not tell you anything new, but if you want to evade AI-stuff: Get out of all the spaces were they try to market you stuff (especially by pushing it onto you without giving you any agenda about it) and/or mine your data, and give anyone who comes up with stuff you find lazy and uninteresting the boot. Reflect for what you need and want the internet, and try to optimize your use (getting e-books about a topic is, imho, much better than surfing/using a search engine. The Wikipedia is great to get a fast entry into a topic), and try to limit your use of it to these reasons.

*Which is indeed a problem, although also a larger one: The environmental destruction would happen with or without AI-technique, but AI might accelerate it. If we want to solve the whole issue, social-political changes will need to be enforced - especially in regard to inequality. Chances for success are, as far as I'm concerned, low. But I believe in idealism: We need to try our best, just for the sake of trying it.

@JINSBEK @DiffydaDude
Just checked out this upscaler. Might be me using it wrong, but I'd honestly rather go with a normal upscaling and artifacts than using this:

[DiffydaDude]

@JINSBEK @DiffydaDude
Just checked out this upscaler. Might be me using it wrong, but I'd honestly rather go with a normal upscaling and artifacts than using this:

What i do is i will upscale it and then lower the resolution down to a bit higher than the original image so it doesnt have all the weird shapes. I also will just upscale a JPG image and downscale it to the original resolution and make it a PNG. I also can just put a grain merge mask of the original image's black parts over the upscale.