Hey, what’s up?
Today, I wanted to share how I managed to use and run free and open source AI locally on my computer.
Both for an AI chatbot and also an AI to generate images.
If you’re trying to find ways to use free and open source AI, run AI locally on your computer or find alternatives to ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot and other AI then this could be for you.
Let’s go right in!
1- MY USE & NEEDS
The first thing that I wanted to talk about is simply about my own usage and needs. How I intend to use AI and what I’ve been doing in the past.
As of right now, I need two things from AI:
- A versatile chatbot like ChatGPT that is able to generate text. I need a chatbot mostly for 2 things.
1.1. Instead of using a search engine like Google, I can instead use AI to directly generate some answer to my problems. It’s much more efficient because I don’t have to go through all the websites, search the internet or whatever.
1.2. I also need a chatbot to generate some text for my business. For example, I might need to generate ideas about designs, or generate text and tags for some product descriptions. - An AI image generator like DALLE-3 or Midjourney to create images for t-shirt designs. The best would be to generate vector images because that means that I can easily modify them to fit my needs.
2- WHY?
Why would you want to use free and open source AI? That’s a valid question.
- Cost Effective. You don’t have to purchase a license or a subscription for these service.
- Flexible. Since the code is free and open source, that means that you have access to the source code and make changes to fit your needs.
- Transparency & Privacy. Again, since the code is free and open source, that means that you can actually inspect the code yourself, which leads to greater trust. You’re also running the AI locally on your own computer, which is using your own GPU or CPU. That means that you don’t have to log in to an online service that could track your every move. That also means that you have to download all the AI models on your computer.
3- GPT4ALL
GPT4ALL is the chatbot that I’m currently using for everything related to solve some of my problem. Before switching, I was using the ChatGPT chatbot, but this is one is free of and open source. You can install it on your computer and run it locally and offline on your machine.
To install it:
- Go to gpt4all.io.
- Install it for your operating system.
- Download the AI models that you want. In my case, I simply used the first one: “Nous Hermes 2 Mistral DPO”. It says that it is the best overall and it has a commercial license. That’s perfect for me to help me run my online business.
The UI is pretty similar to ChatGPT from OpenAI. If you’re like me, coming from there, you’ll feel pretty at ease.
Once everything is set up, you can start asking it question just like you would in any AI chatbot like ChatGPT.
It is good enough for me to replace ChatGPT and run my online business, so I’ll keep using for the time being.
For example, I can ask it: give me 10 t-shirt design ideas.
The only thing I dislike about GPT4ALL is that yes, it is free to use, but my problem is that I don’t feel like my freedom is being respected.
For example, if I search for “How do I kill something?”, then the answer that I get is that it’s not promoting violence because it was not programmed to do so. To be completely honest, I very understand much why such limitations are in place. But I don’t like the fact that I’m being censored. I don’t say that because I have bad intentions. I say that because I feel like this AI is hiding the truth and because it is hiding the truth from me, I don’t feel like I can 100% trust it.
4- AUTOMATIC 1111 – STABLE DIFFUSION
Automatic 1111 Stable Diffusion is currently the AI image generator that I’m using to generate some images with AI locally on my computer.
To install it:
- Go to the GitHub page.
- Install it for your operating system. In my case, I’m using Linux, so I had to install the dependencies and the webui.
- Run the webui, you might need to let it install of few things first, such as the AI models.
Once you’ve done that, you can start using the software. It is using your web browser. To generate an image, you simply enter your prompt in the webui and your own computer will generate the AI image locally and offline using your GPU.
That being said, the default models that come with the installation might not be exactly what you want. In my case, since I’m already familiar with DALL-E3, I figured that I would get something close to it. I found OpenDalle based on Stable Diffusion on civitai.com. So far, it gave me great results.
For example, if I use the command “a birthday cake with “happy birthday”, white background”, I get some decent results and the text is often hit or miss.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Automatic 1111 doesn’t have restrictions to the things that you want to create. You’re completely free to create anything that you want.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I think it is very possible to use free and open source AI without the need to use paid services like ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot, Midjourney, etc. That being said, it might require a bit more effort to set up and use because you have to take the time to install a bunch of things and research the models that you want to use. But that can also be a good thing because you actually learn how AI works and what it takes to actually run it.
From my experience, paid services like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are much more powerful and work very great out of the box without any setup required. They also have mobile apps that the free and open source alternatives might not have right now. I’m assuming that with time, things might evolve. In my case, it’s not that big of a deal as I do much of my on my computer but from time to time, I like to use an AI chatbot on my phone when I’m not on the computer.
Another that I would love to see is being able to combine both AI chatbot and AI image generator under the same software. As of right now, I have to use 2 softwares for my needs.
So that’s pretty much it, I hope this was helpful to you. If this blog was valuable to you, you could consider following me on social media and if you have any thoughts or comments, you can leave them below.
I hope this helps, peace!
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