My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.
We’re racing into an AI-powered future. Emphasis on the word racing.
Nobody’s been there before. We don’t know what could happen…
Tools write our emails, draft our resumes, summarize our calls, and start to know more about our lives than our closest friends.
That’s exciting on the one hand… on the other, it’s hella scary.
AI is no longer just a tool. It’s a mirror of our thoughts. And that mirror is owned by corporations.
This is where the privacy debate becomes urgent.
Laws and regulations aren’t even in place yet.
AI Knows You Better Than Your Browser Does
Your browser knows your habits. It has for years, or decades. And companies like Google are genius at constructing all kinds of things from the data they gather.
But compared to AI, it’s nothing.
AI knows our beliefs, emotions, financial situation, love life, mental health, business plans, and our deepest uncertainties. It knows and remembers all we asked about.
When we use cloud-based AI (like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.), our prompts generally pass through big tech’s servers.
Even if they are “not used for training by default,” the data still lives somewhere. We simply “trust the system.”
But let’s be real: privacy policies today are basically marketing copy written by lawyers.
And it’s not about spying. Or any crazy stuff like that.
It’s is about data extraction at scale. The AI companies don’t just want our inputs, they want the patterns of our thinking.
How we reason. What we desire. What we fear. Because that’s what makes AI valuable. And our personal data helps a ton to train future models.
We’ve seen this story before: Google started as a tool. Then it became an ad company. Facebook started as a social network. Then it became a data-harvesting empire. AI is no different.
Except this time, it’s harvesting a lot more. Because we give it more.
What If AI Didn’t Need to Know Everything About You?
Imagine this instead:
Your AI runs on your computer.
Your prompts never leave your machine.
There are no servers. No middlemen.
No “trust us, we don’t store your data.”
Because the data never leaves your device in the first place.
That’s the idea behind open-source AI platforms that run entirely on your computer or local network.
No tracking. No cloud. No subscription. Big plus.
If AI is the future of personal computing (and it absolutely is), then local-first AI is the only sane path forward.
And I have tried one of those offline AIs.
It’s called
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