I mean its use as a tool, maybe in a small business context. The individual can be the “visionary” giving their idea for a book to a de-facto ghost writer. AI’s will often give you back info that confirms your ideas, so its like any other tool. If I am not good with a hammer then I smash my fingers and if I’m not good with AI then I convince myself the earth is actually flat.

You might check out coreboot and PCs that support it https://www.coreboot.org/end_users.html

This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the “I wish I could do ____. but _____” ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer “a thing”. This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We’re at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.

All of the big tech social media began using AI for moderation by around 2020. It was always advertised as stopping spam and “inauthenticity” but was abused from the beginning as a no-appeal means of silencing those the staff disagreed with. There are undercover videos from years ago where the people who used to run Twitter talked about it and it also showed up in the source code they put on the web after Musk took over. They had undesirable topics that flagged people to be shadowbanned. The general idea was that if whatever you talked about might offend the Senior VP in the corporate lunchroom then you were eventually flagged and made invisible.

Now it’s less obvious because they use ghost banning where your tweets and replies seem to show up, and even get a handful of views from your existing followers, but you’re 100% invisible to the rest of the world. “We put a label on your account” appears in your messages a short while after the ghost ban begins at X. If you reply a lot, it seems guaranteed. Many people have no idea they’re invisible to the world, although when you never get a reply or a like, you’re not as inclined to keep using the platform, so the result ends up being the same as if they did find out.

I think they do it now because they’ve downsized and don’t have many real people working there. The other motivation may be they want to systematically keep the vocal little people from drowning out the commercial accounts who matter to them. Everyone else is there to consume content and view ads.

Earnings are way down from the peak years because the corporate social media enshittifiction drove the majority of the user base to video stream chats like Rumble, Discord, Twitch and youtube chats. Youtube doesn’t seem nearly as inclined to screw with that given the competition. It’s one of the small number of cash cows that pay for everyone else working on neat R&D projects that get cancelled without ever earning a dime.

If they’re tracking web use by PCs they know are not servers, then it’s likely due to a combination of local AI computer web scraping and people using SteamOS devices, which are running Linux. Prosumer local AI users often learn Linux if they don’t already know how to use it, because the software runs more efficiently on it. Anyone with a Steamdeck or Linux distro like Bazzite copying it on the desktop can exit to desktop mode and use it like a normal PC.