Please ELI5 the arguments people use to claim it's possible to use AI/LLMs ethically, locally, openly etc. (piefed.social)

submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) by A_norny_mousse@piefed.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I usually don't even understand the lingo they use. "Open-weighted" is the most recent one, then it usually goes down to specific "models" that everybody is supposed to know about.

These are my thoughts (I will stick to the vague "it" for now, but of course therein lies another question: "and how does all this apply to various specialised AIs"):

Is it really feasible to run it 100% locally? I know there's plenty of people with very powerful rigs indeed, but still. Or are 99% of these people really saying "it would, in theory, be possible to run that locally, therefore your concerns are invalid"?
If yes to the previous: the software doesn't come from nowhere and ultimately still relies on gas-turbine-powered datacenters and stolen IP and stolen personal data, no?

If what I wrote above is true, what exactly are people arguing when they say it's still possible to use LLMs ethically or true to FOSS philosophy, because ... ???

edit

Thanks to all who answered.

I guess it's my fault for asking several questions in one, but this thread has attracted exactly the type of people I'm writing about; several even used the term "open-weighted models" without explaining it.

Asking to get arguments explained, I got more arguments instead.

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[-] Denjin@feddit.uk 3 points 5 hours ago

Question, what do you do with it and how is the data that underlies the model harvested?

[-] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Question, what do you do with it

I use it for both fun throwaway stuff as well as productivity tasks for learning.

Example of fun throwaway:

Do you remember that episode of Seinfeld where the Kramer starts using Facebook marketplace and starts buying the most worthless items before being robbed when trying to get a too-good-to-be-true sale? No? Because it never happened, but you can plug that premise into an crafted LLM prompt and it will pop out a whole TV script with in-character dialog for each actor as well as use of popular existing sets.

Foreign language learning:

I'm studying a foreign language and want to interact with just the level of vocabulary and grammar I have knowledge of right now at my level for practice. I can prompt the LLM to limit itself to just what I know now and adjust the conversation level so I can practice. If I ever get stuck, I can ask the LLM to explain the grammar usage or vocabulary choice.

and how is the data that underlies the model harvested?

I'm not sure what you're asking here. Are you asking, for example, how the Deepseek model was trained? If so, I answered that above. If not, can you rephrase your question?

[-] Balinares@pawb.social 1 points 4 hours ago

You run a program like llama.cpp that can use the weights to run the model, which you can then use for whatever you'd use a model for: figuring out tech stuff, coding, etc. It's a bit involved, but there are tools that make it easy to get started. LM Studio for instance.

In some cases, the lab that created the model publishes the dataset that it was trained on, and those are usually made of publicly available data. In most cases, though, the labs don't give details, but the answer likely involves siphoning every web page they could find.

this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026

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