Per their website premium includes "Unlimited sentence paraphrasing powered by A.I." so I'm not sure they're an appropriate alternative to avoid the "AI" bullshit.

Can confirm good drop in replacement. Also self hostable (to a point )

Does that have a chrome plugin?

I took a quick look at this and it seems that the server portion of this product is open source but the apps such as extensions are not. I'm not saying it's bad or even that it's a red flag. I just felt like I should point it out.

Companies selling consumer data for profit and marketeering: i sleep

Companies using consumer data to train AI models:
R E A L S H I T

True. Companies sell our data to third parties since forever, but some people are worried about it being used to train machine learning models? I'm far more concerned by people using it than AI.

It's because certain companies are stirring the pot and manipulating. They want people mad so they can put restrictions on training AI, to stifle the open source scene.

I did use the cross-post function. Most apps do not currently acknowledge this function which might explain why the article has appeared to you multiple times.

Framing this solely as fear is extremely disingenuous. Speaking only for myself: I'm not against the development of AI or LLMs in general. I'm against the trained models being used for profit with no credit or cut given to the humans who trained it, willing or unwilling.

It's not even a matter of "if you aren't the paying customer, you're the product" - massive swaths of text used to train AIs were scraped without permission from sources whose platforms never sought to profit from users' submissions, like AO3. Until this is righted (which is likely never, I admit, because the LLM owners have no incentive whatsoever to change this behavior), I refuse to work with any site that intends to use my work to train LLMs.

They have a free tier and a $10/mo tier and prominently advertise their AI without any information about privacy. Guaranteed you and your text are the product being used to train their AI.

Alternatively, you switch to LanguageTool because it does the same thing but it is privacy minded.

I think I'd rather not give the company money at all.

I am perfectly fine with providing training data for AI, and have actually spent hours contributing to various projects. However, it is super scummy for a company to collect and use sensitive user data (literally a keylogger) not only without any form of communication or consent, but where the only way to opt out is to pay.

Stuff like this should always be opt-in. It looks better on the company and builds trust.

Ideally, offer payment for users who opt-in to have their writing scraped and used to train AI.

Seems like this could easily be a win-win situation if they gave it a few seconds of thought.

Why do you assume everyone wants this garbage? We were fine without it.

Uhh umm... You are the product! Aaand... Shill for greedy corporations!

I remember when Google said quite openly that they'd give us email addresses with more storage than we'd ever dreamed for life and in return, they'd scan the first few sentences of all messages and use them to target ads at us and we were all like, "Sounds fair."