In relation to my previous article about Facebook and the threat AI poses to our privacy, I found one way to limit the damage to some extent. Recently I started using Venice AI, a LLM chatbot like Gemini and ChatGPT, but with a sole focus on user privacy. That's their main selling point. Conversations are stored only in your local browser, never on Venice servers, unlike with ChatGPT and Gemini. I mainly compared these three.
Venice does conversations, generates really great photos, and also does programming code. Gemini can do the same, but ChatGPT cannot generate images. For the latter, you'll have to work through OpenAI's DALL-E model, and I think they're charging money for that now. I will have to check again, things are really moving fast in the AI space.
Both Venice and ChatGPT are 'not live', not 'connected to the internet', as Venice puts it. This just means that they cannot give you information about very recent events. Gemini, though, thanks to being part of the Google search engine, can give you information about what happened an hour ago. Gemini wins in this aspect but falls short in other regards.
(UPDATE: Three days after this article, Venice actually did go 'live', meaning it does connect to the internet now and can now give you up-to-the-minute information about the latest events. So Gemini loses that advantage.)
Google's AI bot won't create photos with people on it, unlike Venice, which does. However, Venice only creates'safe'mode' photos on their free package. Thus, no lack of clothes photos, gentlemen. If you want it to generate a hot celeb going like Eve through a garden, you'll have to sign up for their paid price plan.
Being ultra-politically correct, Gemini tries to please everyone by deploying censorship. Venice is more 'brutal', and tells a thing like it is, and I would dare say that ChatGPT may have less censorship than Gemini as well.
My issue with censorship? It withholds information from people. It decides for us, like we're little children, what we are allowed to think and say, and that's a threat to our freedom. I'm a very curious person by nature, and I'm grown up and intelligent enough to handle information. I don't want a company to determine what I may or may not see or have access to, and I dare say that you, the reader, feel the same.
Regarding pricing, both Gemini and ChatGPT's paid packages cost around 20 dollars per month, while Venice costs 8 dollars a month, or 49 dollars annually. All three offer free packages, which is sufficient for the average user. Where Venice shines is that one does not have to sign up first to use the bot, while the other two do require this. Anonymity and privacy, see. For a question about why your ball joints itched, Venice is your safe bet. You don't want AI to remember your itches ten years from now.
Interesting and refreshing is that one can pay Venice for their paid plan with crypto. All my readers know that I'm a big fan of teaching traditional banks a lesson by getting everyone to start using crypto instead of fiat.
Do download my free e-book for beginners on how to escape the stranglehold banks have over you, if you have not done so yet.
I have not checked the perks of the free plans on Gemini and ChatGPT, but on Venice on their non-signed-up plan, the guest one, you can generate a handful of images per day and do 25 prompts. But on the free plan where you sign up for an account, you can have it generate 20 images (or 25? Saw both numbers in different places) per day, and give it 100 prompts. (Prompts are just the fancy term for 'very detailed questions'.) Most people only ask 99 questions about why someone threw an egg at them, so 100 a day should do the job.
Venice's emphasis on privacy is what appeals most to me. As they say, "The platform doesn't record any of your info (other than your email and IP address) and doesn't see your conversations or the responses. Venice doesn’t (and can’t) share any of this information with other parties (corporations or governments) because it doesn’t have it. Venice's entire infrastructure and ethos are aligned around respecting individual privacy.
The platform remains neutral - it doesn't filter content other than the “Safe Venice” mode to limit adult content, which Pro accounts (the paid plan) can turn off."
Overall, the three AI chatbots each have their strengths and weaknesses, so I'd say it is a good idea to start using Venice as your default, but to keep the other two as backups. (If you sign up with Venice via my referral link - it's free - both me and you score some free points that unlock extra features.) I fell into the habit of giving at least two of the three the same prompt, with each open in a separate tab, and it is almost comical what different - or eerily similar sometimes - outputs one gets.
When dealing with mankind's new monster, one needs to keep their wits together.
