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Comment by GCUMstlyHarmls | Hacker News Reader

> I even got a warning on my OpenAI account.

This is kind of terrifying to me, regularly. No real manner of recourse to normal people without a following, potential exclusion from real fundamental tooling. Imagine OpenAI goes on to buy 20 companies and now you cant use Figma, Next, whatever just because you once tripped some very foggy line somehow. Not just OpenAI but the entire ecosystem is so... hard to read.

I was asking Gemini about a quote from catch 22 and it kept dying mid stream saying it cant talk about it, god knows why, it had no violent or sexual content -- though that is in the book. I could imagine it dinging my whole workspace account just because ... shrug?...

I know ideally the future is local, but I don't know how real that is for most people at least in the next few years with practical costs and power usage except I guess through a M* processor if you're in that ecosystem.

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Open models running locally is the answer. Relying on proprietary, closed software always puts that company's priorities above your own when using their software. You have given up control.

While running them locally presently doesn't make sense economically, you don't need to run them locally to address this issue. There is a lot of competition in hosting open models and you have a variety of services to choose from. Run the open models now, reward that ecosystem instead of continuing to reward closed systems that dreams of rent-seeking.

You don't need to run the model locally if you don't care about sharing your data. Personally I am happy to share data with Kimi or Deepseek if it means we get better OSS models. For private stuff though local is king

It'll be a while yet before open models that're good enough will be viable for local use. Heck I've been trying to use the Qwen 3.5 39B A3B on my system, which is modest but no slouch, and have only been able to get ~4.5 tok/s after optimization, and it really runs my system red (fans instantly go crazy). It's just not practical for serious work.

I've been using Qwen 3.5 and then 3.6 27b Q4 on Ollama with a single 7900 XTX with the codex cli, and I have been blown away by how genuinely useful it is. I've been able to ask it to do long, multi step problems, and it's able to do things that would have likely taken me days to iron out in a matter of hours, or even minutes sometimes.

I get about 30 tok/s, which is far from blazing, but given the capability it has it is absolutely viable for accelerating my work.

Yep, and with ID verification, it's not like you can just make another account either. At least, I'm guessing if they don't already, they'll soon be blacklisting individuals, not accounts.

Imagine your livelihood depending on access to LLMs and then OpenAI ban you with no recourse. This is where AI legislation should be focusing right now IMO. We can ensure a level of fairness for everyone without putting the brakes on.

It's probably because you were talking about a quote from a book (ie copyrighted material). Authors have sued the AI companies for repeating / memorizing copyrighted works, and getting an AI to discuss a quote would be making it repeat a portion of copyrighted work.

Funny that your case is Kurt Vonnegut. I think I had Claude refuse a task where I was doing an OCR scan of a book review (in a zine / journal a family member published years ago). I think the review might have included a Vonnegut quote as well, and that I ultimately figured it out it was the quote that was making Claude refuse. I may be misremembering the author though.

Mistral had no such refusals, but their OCR is lesser quality.

Joseph Heller methinks, but probably not too far away in embedding space!

OMG. Where did I get Kurt Vonnegut from? I swear I saw that name in the post and the whole time I was thinking "but he didn't write Catch 22"... I must be fuzzier brained than I thought tonight. Thank you for being kind with your correction.

Hopefully I'm still correct that quoting from books is a reason for some over-zealous task refusals, though.

> Authors have sued the AI companies for repeating / memorizing copyrighted works, and getting an AI to discuss a quote would be making it repeat a portion of copyrighted work.

short quotes are fair use..

>Imagine OpenAI goes on to buy 20 companies and now you cant use Figma, Next, whatever just because you once tripped some very foggy line somehow.

Don't worry, you can just make your own Figma, Next, whatever if you have some thousand dollars worth of tokens. This is at least what all of the AI thought leaders have been telling me for the past couple of years.

I think it’s so bizarre that chatgpt regularly gives me advice on how to get around it’s filters. Like, literally “I can’t do anything if you use copyrighted character’s name, but how about you just say ‘someone that looks like character’”. If you are going to do that, can you just execute the instruction?

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