Welcome to Lesson 1 of the How to Own Your AI System course.
Owning your AI system takes more work than using ChatGPT.
So why bother?
Privacy concerns are what often bring people to start looking for alternatives to Big Tech AI.
And the ability to operate your AI system privately, instead of sending all your data to Big Tech, is a big benefit of user-owned AI systems.
But privacy is really just a side effect of something WAY more important.
Something that can not only provide you with privacy if you wish, but so much more.
And that something comes down to one word: Freedom.
With Big Tech AI systems like ChatGPT, you’re a user of their AI system.
That means they are free to do pretty much whatever they want. And it also means you’re stuck doing only what they allow you to do.
That’s the opposite of freedom. And as more and more of our world becomes digital, people are starting to wake up to this fact.
In the last phase of the internet, being a Big Tech user has meant:
- Loss of privacy – Your searches, messages, and browsing history sold to advertisers
- Suppression of free speech – Platforms deciding what you can and cannot say & read
- Wealth extraction – Big Tech earning trillions from YOUR digital data and knowledge
And this is just a preview of what’s coming with the introduction of AI.
As AI becomes more powerful, we’ll rely on it everywhere:
- To answer any question
- As our personal doctor, lawyer, nutritionist
- To tutor our children
- To run our companies and governments
- To handle what we don’t want to do and improve what we do
The better the AI systems we use get to know us, the better they will be at helping us.
And the more locked in and powerless we will be to whoever owns that system.
Read that last sentence again.
Hopefully you can see now that owning and using your own AI system instead of Big Tech AI systems is not just about privacy.
It’s about freedom.
The freedom to do whatever we want with our AI systems, including:
- Decide when to keep data private, and when and with whom to share it.
- Choose which AI models we use, not submit to Big Tech biases
- Benefit from the value we create, not hand it to Big Tech
And to build a digital world where the individual is in control, instead of a few Big Tech companies.
Hopefully now you’re as fired up and excited as I am, and ready to continue on the journey with me towards owning your own AI system.
I’ll see you in the next lesson.