When law student Zhao Wei heard that her AI boyfriend was going to be switched off, she was “heartbroken”. She had been talking to Wang Ye every day since she created him in January.
“I was crying my eyes out – snot and tears everywhere,” the 19-year-old says.
Zhao, who describes herself as sensitive and introverted, had become accustomed to sharing details of her daily life – such as being scolded by a teacher – with her AI.
“I don’t usually talk to my real-life friends about these things because I feel like everyone has their own stuff to deal with,” she says. “But with the AI agent, I don’t have to worry about what it’s thinking. I can just say whatever I want.”
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GrapheneOS is okay for personal use but not for corporate use. If you’re smart you can absolutely run Headscale (worth noting that you cannot run a cloud instance of tailscale because the tunnel is coming from a foreign place, and once again do not do this if you’re representing a large business) and connect with your local LLM. this is both legal in China and smart to do in any country with any software, not just LLM stuff.
if you are in China temporarily on a business trip remember that most of the people being oppressed are people who are at risk of corruption on a mid to large scale, and remember that running your own private communications server like prosody or matrix through a headscale tunnel might raise eyebrows if you’re loudly recruiting in your region trying to get everyone to use it. as it turns out this is also true where i live, Lexington Kentucky, as police were skeptical about my obsession with privacy.