You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 3: Software

This is part three in our series of how to avoid generative AI altogether. My friend and colleague Mar asked, How do we do this? How do we how do we just get rid of generative AI? Which is really weird to answer because normally I'm saying the opposite. But we've covered legal stuff in part one.

We covered infrastructure stuff in part two. Today we're going to cover software and tools in part three. First, applications. Things like Office software, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, you name it. It's not a surprise.

Literally, everyone is putting generative AI everywhere they possibly can. People are treating it like Nutella and putting it everywhere, whether it's a good idea or not. To counteract that, you can't use those services. You have to use other applications instead. So if you're using Microsoft Office, you need to use a tool like OpenOffice, the open source product that does not have generative AI capabilities built into it.

And you run it locally. And as we talked about in the previous episode, you run a system like Lulu that prohibits it from talking to the internet. You essentially you block things on an app by app level in your operating system. Say you may not talk to the internet. You can't go to the internet for any reason.

That will prevent that app from sending data intentionally or not somewhere else. If you've got a website, you can't use Google Analytics. Period, end of story. You can't use anything Google. So you want to use an open source product like Motomo to do your web analytics.

Again, take a look at the terms of service for, you know, there are plenty of other services, but if you want to be sure that your data is not being used by AI, you have to own the software and the hardware that it's running on. Instead of HubSpot or other marketing automation services, the open source product, Mautic will do that. Again, you've got to administer the server. You've got to host it and own it yourself. But if you do, you know that that data is not going anywhere else because it's yours.

For CRM, again, you can't use a service like Salesforce because Salesforce has their Einstein AI in it. So you've got to use an open source product like Suite Street CRM, Sugar CRM, etc. In general, in general, uh SaaS, software as a service. The companies and products and solutions in that space are going to be integrating AI. In general, it's a disability thumb.

So you have to essentially avoid any form of SaaS software. Because just because it's a vendor says today, oh, we're not using AI in this, they're they're one acquisition away from saying, hey, look, we can monetize our data. So the only way to prevent that is to say, you know what? We're we're no SaaS shop at all. We use local applications only that are on our hardware that we control.

For your web browser, can't use Chrome, can't use Chrome derivatives. Uh I would even avoid other commercial browsers. There's some browsers that are privacy focused, like Brave, the Brave browser, or Firefox that are very, very uh privacy focused. Those are the ones to use. You want to use strict open source ad blocking software, something like uBlock origin that just says, nope, no ads.

You know, you may not run trackers, you may not collect data of any kind from me. You get nothing. In general, you want to use open source software. Uh, this is software that you download and run that is not typically run by a company, that you are allowed to adjust the source code. And this comes with obligations.

Um, you have to check the licensing on the open source software for what is and is not permitted. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's private. Uh and you want to think about inspecting the code to see what data does this code collect. And do I want that? You will want to move to an open source operating system for your devices.

So on your desktop, some variant of Linux, uh, on your phone, a degoogled uh Android that has any references, any any code components to AI removed. You can't use iOS, uh, which is the Apple iPhone, because uh Apple literally is going to be releasing Apple intelligence uh in iOS 18. Um, and you can't use the commercial versions of Android, the one that ships with most phones, because that's got Google's AI in it, but you can get the Android code itself and remove the AI components. The last thing to do on the software front is regularly monitor news and announcements from your vendors and service providers. Anytime you see an announcement from any vendor saying, hey, we're in a new licensing agreement with Google, with OpenAI, with Anthropic, you know that they're just handing over data that those companies can use to build models with.

So any vendor that you work with, and we talked about this in the legal section in part one, any vendor you've you work with, you've got to have the ironclad in your contracts to say no AI. Um, but you will want to certainly monitor news and announcements from vendors of the past, right? If there's a vendor that still has your data, you need to be vigilant about checking the news to see if they've entered into any licensing agreements for content. Because everyone who's got content is trying to figure out how to monetize it with AI vendors and license their data sets. Because AI companies are often a lot of money.

And it's really hard to say, nope, I don't want money. It's very, very hard to say that. So that's part three. In the next part, we're going to talk about marketing itself, the marketing practices and things. And I will tell you up front, marketing is going to get difficult if you want to completely avoid generative AI.

But it is possible to some degree. So stay tuned for that. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already. And if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.