What does it mean to make something
free of AI?

IN SHORT:

The code for this website was typed using my brain, hands and keyboard, and coding software. The same is true for the paragraphs, the wordings, the shitty writing. It was not done through the results of prompting a Large Language Model of any kind. I didn't even use a local one. No automation was involved. I might as well have made this site in 2016. I "made" the images, and any other content made here has been made by me.
The hosting services I pay for bombard me with advertisement for the usage of LLM "tools".
My eyes skip past them the same way they do with regular ads in other sites.
At the time I write (type) this, this disclaimer is VERY necessary.

HOWEVER: That does not suffice to explain what's going on here and everywhere.

THE SHORT VERSION OF A LONGER EXPLANATION is that the technology and the problems that came with the recent advancement we call "AI" already existed years prior to the big release of the most commonly known LLM's that hit the general public.
AI is nothing new, only much fucking worse.

Technicallytechnically speaking, there is not a single person alive today who knows what it's like to live in a world WITHOUT "computers".

Are you able to imagine what early civilizations were like? When trading first began and agriculture became the backbone of modernity. A market emerged in our evolution and, like any other advancing species in the universe, humanity had to get skilled at keeping track of basic arithmetic. This is chiefly what led to the development of the first tools used to keep track of numbers (like the abacus). There's a whole history to the machines we have used to expedite calculation, but there is not way I'll get into that here, at least not now. What's key to know about our relationship with computers is that being mathematically accurate takes not just effort but also a lot of time, and long before your world's population numbers in the hundreds of millions, you can't just rely on brains and notes, and you can't just rely on the talents of the few.
This is no little deal. Lives are affected by how we count. Modern computers, the most powerful calculators we have come up with so far, were developed to meet the ever-increasing demands of anthropological logistics. Specifically for war, but violence is inherent in the system, so, agriculture, keeping track of stocks and trading, gutting a guy who owns land you want, it's all the same. By the mid 1990s, they were already a common American household item you could even expect some grandmas to have at home. Did grandma need one? No. Did anyone really need a computer? Yes and no, but that's another story. In all honesty, they were very beneficial, but practical uses were not necessarily what made people want to buy computers. Whether or not technology is necessary to adopt, you'll need to convince the public they should. The advertisement for computers were similar to the advertisement for AI today. The idea was the we needed to advance towards the future. What future? Just the future.

1999, the future was there for those who could afford it.

So the way it used to work is that a software developer would store their new program in their own systems. A CD, a floppy disk, whatever. You would buy (and OWN--YOU WOULD OWN THIS MATERIAL OBJECT AND DO WHATEVER YOU WANTED WITH IT)and put this storage device in your computer. Your computer would read this and it would run the program. The work was done by YOUR computer. The program would come with specs pretty much telling the buyer "you will need to have a computer powerful enough to run this software". And if your computer could, you were good to go. You wanted to run a fancier program? You needed a more powerful computer. And if/when you ran that program, your fans would amp up and you'd be the one who'd end up paying for the wattage increase.

As computers became more powerful, the programs being run were gradually coming up with gifty features that we'd idenfity as "AI" today. Some games had enemies that would seem to have minds of their own, capable of evoking more complex emotional responses from the players. A word processor would have a little animated pet that would try to help you write your documents. I remember Clippy telling me his(?) opinions on my shittyass stories in MS Word as far back as 2004. There were programs with text-to-speech capabilities and translator software. All of this was available locally, meaning: in your computer and only in your computer. That changed very quickly.

The internet was also birthed by war, but for the rest of us, the benign idea of sharing files with other people with computers, communicating seemingly by magic, sounded fantastical. The internet was like a whole universe to me when I first went into my browser in the very early 2000s. That was me as a child, of course, exploring a world of endless possibilities. Intelligent, thinking adults had other interesting opinions. Very quickly, internet usage started to look familiar (to modern users). This could even be felt in the media at the time, exploring concepts such as the implied lack of consent (everyone must be connected, all the time), and depersonalization and the Proteus effect (just to name a couple of good ones: Serial Experiments Lain and Perfect Blue).

The internet, for better and for worse, was mystical. It was the "AI" of the time. That is, the stuff everyone was talking about so much that whoever didn't want to hear about it was getting sick of it rather quickly. Everything just had to be electronic, everything just had to be online. If you didn't have a website, your cause was doomed to be ignored and be viewed as less-than or unworthy of anyone's attention.

Society was quickly changing, socially and commercially, and the FBI and CIA had to change how they approached crime, and we had to reconsider classic ideas regarding freedom of expression, rights to intellectual property, and much more. All of this, and all we're talking about, to this very day, is the ability for your computer to be connnected to someone else's. From the cloud to your favorite porn site, that's all you've ever done when you connect online. There is someone else's computer you and millions of others are connecting to, physically sitting somewhere else.

If millions, and quickly, billions of people are connecting to the same computer, we must be talking about some really powerful computer! Yes. More precisely, it's often a collection of several computers essentially acting as one, and they're not always located in one single place. But, pretty much, you are indeed accessing a very power computer. Well, that computer must get really hot. Yes. And it must then have some big fans or some kind of cooling technology. Yes. And it must pull A LOT of wattage. Yes.

To be continued...