I think this is sporadic, I've had the oddest behavior at times then everything is normal. Does it keep asking for proof you are human? are you signed in to copilot?

Nope to both. "Signing in" implies having an account and I refuse to register for any of them. I don't trust them to not share/abuse my personal information, such as selling my e-mail address or using information from my conversations to spam me.

ChatGPT?

To the best of my knowledge, OpenAI requires you to sign-in with your e-mail even for their free tier.

 

Nope to both. "Signing in" implies having an account and I refuse to register for any of them. I don't trust them to not share/abuse my personal information, such as selling my e-mail address or using information from my conversations to spam me.



To the best of my knowledge, OpenAI requires you to sign-in with your e-mail even for their free tier.

Get a free Proton Mail account—Swiss-based, created by a group from CERN, end-to-end encryption with client side encryption so Proton has no way to read the email on the server. I have Proton Unlimited primarily for their VPN but it include a lot of interesting services from a company that is about as close to one to trust as I know of.

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The also offer a hide-my-email service like Apple's that generates a random alias you can deactivate.

Hide-my-email aliases
With a hide-my-email alias, you can keep your real email address hidden while registering on a new website, making an online purchase, or signing up for a newsletter. Unlike your primary email address, you can easily deactivate hide-my-email aliases if they’re ever revealed in a data breach or if you start receiving spam.

You can create up to 10 hide-my-email aliases with the Proton Free plan, or upgrade to Proton Unlimited to create as many as you need. You can create hide-my-email aliases from the Proton Mail Security Center.

Hide your email address behind a unique alias
Create a unique email alias and use it instead of using your @proton.me address. All emails sent to your randomly generated hide-my-email alias (such as newsletter.rand0m@passmail.net) will be instantly forwarded to your Proton Mail address.

By using an email alias, you can keep your Proton Mail address hidden while still being able to receive, reply and send emails to the sender, without even revealing your actual address. This helps protect your email address from being misused.

For example, Alice wants to make an online purchase, but she doesn’t want to receive all the marketing emails the website will send her long after her purchase. When creating an account to make her purchase, instead of using her real email address, “alice.jones@proton.me”, she can use a Proton Pass email alias like “alice.wzzsn798523@passmail.net”.

By using an alias, Alice hides her real email address from the website and is still able to receive all emails sent to her email alias directly in her inbox. If, at some point in the future, the website sells Alice’s email address and she starts to get large amounts of spam, Alice can disable the alias and stop receiving spam.

Hide-my-email aliases can easily be created from the Security center in Proton Mail. You can also use Proton Pass, or SimpleLogin by Proton.

Overall highly recommended and even with paying for—but you don't have to. This one is run by the good guys.

 

Nope to both. "Signing in" implies having an account and I refuse to register for any of them. I don't trust them to not share/abuse my personal information, such as selling my e-mail address or using information from my conversations to spam me.

Well its Microsoft, you just use your existing MS login. Your web browsing is a far better disseminator of email addresses, every time you enter into a site is could easily be grabbed.

To the best of my knowledge, OpenAI requires you to sign-in with your e-mail even for their free tier.

Yes, they want email addresses, Microsoft already have mine because I've used hotmail since the 1990s, if you have a Gmail account then Google have yours.

 

Get a free Proton Mail account—Swiss-based, created by a group from CERN, end-to-end encryption with client side encryption so Proton has no way to read the email on the server. I have Proton Unlimited primarily for their VPN but it include a lot of interesting services from a company that is about as close to one to trust as I know of.

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The also offer a hide-my-email service like Apple's that generates a random alias you can deactivate.



Overall highly recommended and even with paying for—but you don't have to. This one is run by the good guys.

Now that's got my attention!

Do they insist on an alternate contact phone/email?

 

Well its Microsoft, you just use your existing MS login. Your web browsing is a far better disseminator of email addresses, every time you enter into a site is could easily be grabbed.

Which is why I don't enter my email address into web sites!

Yes, they want email addresses, Microsoft already have mine because I've used hotmail since the 1990s, if you have a Gmail account then Google have yours.

Which is why I have neither a hotmail account nor a gmail account.

 

Now that's got my attention!

Do they insist on an alternate contact phone/email?

They require an email for initial verification only*, it is discarded after that. You don't have to provide any other contact information.
*anti-bot measure

 

Which is why I don't enter my email address into web sites!
Which is why I have neither a hotmail account nor a gmail account.

Having an email address that only you know is certainly secure, I'll give you that.

 

Having an email address that only you know is certainly secure, I'll give you that.

I never said that only I know it. I said that I am extremely paranoid when it comes to giving it out. I gave it to AAC, for instance.

While I avoid being in a position of needing to give out my e-mail address as much as possible, it certainly happens and, when I do find myself in that position, I actually take the time to explore the site's privacy policy to see how they will use it (or at least what freedom they give themselves to use it). If I don't like the terms, then I don't give it out. There have been numerous instances where I have flat refused to sign up for something as a result.

When I first got on the Internet I wasn't careful and within a few months I was receiving over five hundred spam e-mails a day. When I bought my domain nearly thirty years ago I knew that I wanted to keep that e-mail address for the rest of my life, if at all possible, and so adopted my current attitude. I was still using the same provider, so I still had access to the original e-mail account. After several years I was curious and I signed back on and it was still getting over two hundred spam emails a day. After nearly three decades of using my current address, I get a few spam e-mails a week -- and each one makes my heart flutter a bit, wondering if my address has finally gotten out into the wild. I have no spam filters -- I don't want to risk missing an important e-mail because some spam filter didn't like a word in a subject line.

 

https://10minutemail.com/
https://bugmenot.com/

 

I never said that only I know it. I said that I am extremely paranoid when it comes to giving it out. I gave it to AAC, for instance.

While I avoid being in a position of needing to give out my e-mail address as much as possible, it certainly happens and, when I do find myself in that position, I actually take the time to explore the site's privacy policy to see how they will use it (or at least what freedom they give themselves to use it). If I don't like the terms, then I don't give it out. There have been numerous instances where I have flat refused to sign up for something as a result.

When I first got on the Internet I wasn't careful and within a few months I was receiving over five hundred spam e-mails a day. When I bought my domain nearly thirty years ago I knew that I wanted to keep that e-mail address for the rest of my life, if at all possible, and so adopted my current attitude. I was still using the same provider, so I still had access to the original e-mail account. After several years I was curious and I signed back on and it was still getting over two hundred spam emails a day. After nearly three decades of using my current address, I get a few spam e-mails a week -- and each one makes my heart flutter a bit, wondering if my address has finally gotten out into the wild. I have no spam filters -- I don't want to risk missing an important e-mail because some spam filter didn't like a word in a subject line.

Every time an email is sent to/from you, your email address is part of the data.

 

Every time an email is sent to/from you, your email address is part of the data.

Duh....

Your point?

 

I've been using Copilot, Microsoft's LLM accessible via Edge, for a while as a search engine (meaning that anything it says must be vetted before relying on it) and have found it to be quite useful in that role. I would say that the information it provides is reasonably accurate quite a bit more often than not.

However, recently it has become virtually unusable. It cuts of it's responses mid sentence (occasionally midword), forcing me to use the "Stop" button. Then, I usually have to provide the next prompt twice in order to get it to respond, and usually with another cutoff response. Some of the exchanges have become downright comical as I have tried to get it to explain the cause for this change in behavior. It blows smoke up my backside, apologizing profusely and telling me that I have every right to expect complete responses and how it will now provide the complete response to my previous question, only to cut it off in mid-sentence. Then, like any elementary school child, tries to insist that what it provided was, technically, a complete sentence (which it clearly wasn't).

As entertaining as it can be, it makes it useless for actually exploring anything.

So, two questions:

#1) Are other people that use Copilot seeing the same thing, or is it me (something with my browser set up or, perhaps, network connection)?

#2) What other FREE LLMs are out there (that do NOT require any kind of registration to use) that you have found to generally provide decent responses. It's especially nice if they provide, at least if asked, sources where they obtained information from.

Duck Duck Go has an anonymizer that doesn’t require log-in, not sure which LLM they use, they might even combine outputs from multiple LLMs.

 

Duck Duck Go has an anonymizer that doesn’t require log-in, not sure which LLM they use, they might even combine outputs from multiple LLMs.

BTW: I did use Copilot out of Edge like you are but it didn’t take long for me to catch it making up data. When I asked for the source it flat-ass lied to me and didn’t have a source.

 

BTW: I did use Copilot out of Edge like you are but it didn’t take long for me to catch it making up data. When I asked for the source it flat-ass lied to me and didn’t have a source.

I'm not aware of any that don't make things up. Everything they spout needs to be vetted -- but if that is kept in mind, they can be very useful.

 

I'm not aware of any that don't make things up. Everything they spout needs to be vetted -- but if that is kept in mind, they can be very useful.

These systems are essentially statistical in nature, there is no concept of true/false or even logical reasoning. They generate sentences (responses) iteratively from a huge training DB that reflects statistical properties of the training data.

So its the knowledge base that implicitly produces "lies" or "errors" not any innate "self" or rational emulated mind.

I agree that they "make things up" but they do so driven by the training data, there's no intelligence at all (but to us, we perceive it as intelligence because historically we've only ever had conversations with other minds) not even artificial but rather "fake", we should call them FI not AI. Look at any decent book on AI from the 70, these were focused on truly seeking to understand intelligence, create models and algorithms, not LLMs.

Do you remember Shakey ?

Note the "large PDP-10 computer" with a whopping 1MB of memory!