Using ChatGPT privately

Questions
1

I must confess. I’m finding ChatGPT quite irresistible in giving me such good, important information.

I have read PrivacyGuides recommendation to use set up an offline AI chat, but I lack the computer resources (and knowledge (“help me ChatGPT!”)) to do that, and it seems like yet another tech rabbit hole I feel I just don’t have the time for right now. I also highly doubt these options will be anywhere near as good at providing the info I need as ChatGPT.

But of course, as somebody who cares enough about their privacy to use this website, I am concerned about my ChatGPT activity.

I use it solely through Tor, and try to do a separate session for each topic/set of questions I have. Yet, I am still worried that it may still manage to connect my input across sessions (especially cos I doubt few people use it without account through Tor), building a profile on me, and perhaps it may be able to deanonymize me if it can tie my input to some kind of leaked data it could in the future gain access to.

It’s crazy powerful, that much I know.

I told myself I’d stop using it. But then something comes up, and it’s a choice between hours of browsing, likely not finding an answer for something very important, versus 5 minutes on ChatGPT. I know people here are going to insist I don’t use this and a tonne of other tools and services or whatever which have no respect for privacy, and while I somewhat agree, I just feel for a lot of people, a lot of the time, myself included, it’s unrealistic.

So…….

I’m wondering do you think I am taking adequate precaution in using Tor separate sessions, and not giving it any directly identifiable information?

Do you use it, and if so, how do you mind your privacy?

Or would you continue to insist that this is something I really really really need to avoid at all costs and that I should put all other life tasks on hold, sacrifice sleep over the weekend, and maybe spend at least a thousand dollars to setup an offline LLM asap and just suck it up if it isn’t as good as I want it to be.

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2

or use something like for example: https://lumo.proton.me or https://duck.ai (duckduckgo AI has chatgpt models) or equivalent sites that utilize some form of encryption or other means like duckduckgo’s

3

If you’re on linux, Alpaca is super easy and the available models compete with chatgpt in terms of quality. Doesn’t solve your processing power limitations though.

4

Well, similar questions have been asked several times here I believe.

My go to recommendation if you don’t share any PII with your LLMs, NanoGPT is gold. You can use and pay for it privately or even anonymously.

5

There is 3 good choices:

  1. DuckDuckGo AI is anonymous and quick to use.
  2. Proton Lumo is confidential (most private online service)
  3. NanoGPT is both cheap, anonymous and most powerful (in specific cases if you need highest precision)

I asked this question myself before here:

A lot of people recommended NanoGPT, so I started using it, its great service in many ways. You can learn in this post why. Proton Lumo did not exist yet back then.

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