Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

[robkelk]

The Register: Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

The late great Grace Hopper used to hand out 30 cm (roughly 1 foot) lengths of wire as physical examples of a nanosecond: that's how far light can travel in one billionth of a second. If Google considers a 4 GB model to be "nano" sized, then it puts Hanff's hyperbolic comment about the climate footprint into real perspective. It gives a hint of the size of the real gigantic models in the datacenters metastasizing across the world.

A recent study led by Grace Liu at Carnegie-Mellon found that regular AI use caused measurable cognitive impairment. It's worth thinking carefully about what we trade away when we outsource our thinking and, separately, what the planet pays to power the systems we're outsourcing it to.

This vulture suggests you turn it off now, everywhere you can.

[Labster]

Honestly, something like this was actually what I wanted: AI that didn't take up data centers.  You know, Chobits that live around you.

Of course, the latest version of Chrome strikes out the "without sending data to Google servers" language... which kind of defeats the point of this feature.

I'm in a really weird place with respect to AI.  My industry is moving towards it very fast, where I really can't use it at all for moral reasons.  The first reason is really iffy: AI are more or less literal daimons summoned to fulfill a purpose, but that we don't really control.  Sometimes something that brings us what we want without true understanding or empathy will lead us astray, as has already happened to some people.  The much more concrete reason is that as an environmentalist, I can't morally use that will double the demand for energy before the transition to renewables is even halfway complete.  And together, they represent something of a demonic bargain: you get easy information, without having to think yourself, that probably contains confident lies – in exchange, you destroy your world and the living things here a little more each time you use it, be it from habitat loss or asthma, while feeding more information to the American oligarchs.

With the Industrial Revolution, the bargain was to make things for people.  With the AI, the bargain is to remove the need for people.  No wonder the first use of AI is for customer service, to quickly remove the need for human empathy.  And yet I would still use a local model, because then most of the risk is gone.