You have a point with all this, but we should all be able to agree that a speech synthesis program made prior to the big AI invasion 1. did not make use of large-scale data scraping, nor were they the product of stealing anyone and everyone’s voices without a second thought, and 2. was likely made with much better intentions in mind then anything large companies are pushing currently, and 3. has far less of a negative impact on society and the environment at large. Even if the second one isn’t true, what does that mean for all of us? Should we refuse to run a piece of open source software because one singular person on the dev team turned out to be a shithead? That’s the direction I see this mindset going. Yes, we all should minimize the harm we do, as I am trying to do right now. I refuse to use any modern-day form of “generative” AI, so I decided to ask a community opposed to AI if there are any older, open source programs that could lend me a helping hand. No, I can’t confirm that every single line of code was written with good intentions, but how could anyone, for anything? I’m pretty shocked to see this take on an anti-AI community, because this is one step away from “well, we can’t stop it so lets just use it reluctantly instead of searching for other methods” which is the kind of idea that I think rarely holds water.