[ExI] What are AIs thinking about?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2026 at 12:05 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On 02/09/2026 15:22, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> > I wonder why you asked us before just asking your AI of choice directly
>
> Apart from an option on the search engine I normally use, I don't use AI, and wouldn't even know how to start.
>
> If there was an option to use ChatGPT or something similar without signing up to anything, that doesn't require a smartphone and doesn't harvest personal information, then I might be tempted to give it a try for the odd thing like my question here, but I've never really been interested enough to try and find out.

Ah.  Well, for me, I just go to https://chatgpt.com/ .  I do have to
sign up, technically, but it's a free registration.  I don't need my
smartphone; although I do sometimes use it that way, most of my use is
from my laptop.  I have verified that it barely has my email address
and name, which I voluntarily gave it; I know of someone who gave it a
pseudonym, and ChatGPT only ever knows that person by that alias.

It does know about projects I have discussed with it - because I have
discussed those projects with it, which is rather the point.  It
doesn't know anything about me that I haven't either told it or told
it to discover online about me.  (I'm "in the weights", as it were,
but I'm not that famous.)

There are limits on the free tier - such as amount of imagery you can
generate per day (but that resets within about a day if I hit the cap)
- but I have found it to be quite usable.