There's an app called Private AI that will let you run models locally on Android. It has a few smaller models available for free to try it out, but the larger models like Llama 3 (or the option to use your own downloaded models) require a $10 unlock purchase.
I would argue that larger brands have to have more ads to sway opinion because people are already familiar with their products. Coca-cola is one of the bigger advertisers, but everyone already knows what Coke tastes like and if they like it. Seeing dozens of Coke ads won't change someone's opinion much, compared with seeing a single ad for a new drink can take them from 100% unawareness of the product to knowing it exists.
Word of mouth is a great way to grow, but only once you already have users. Word of mouth requires people to already be your customer to bring in new customers, so the less business you have the less potentially useful it is.
If word of mouth is the only advertisement replacement allowed, it would force many companies to rely on fake sockpuppet customers to try to get started.
Thankfully that is how a lot of AI is working right now, open source models for both LLM and Stable Diffusion let people have access to uncensored reasonably decent quality AI tools.
In other categories of AI generated content though, such as speech and music, the open source alternatives are either lacking or completely absent. And with the company behind Stable Diffusion being on the verge of financial collapse, we may see Stable Diffusion fall far behind it's closed source counterparts.
What would you recommend as an alternative to advertisements? I do think a lot of ads go too far, but I think some form of advertisement is necessary to get new awareness of new brands and products. Otherwise only the pre-established large brands and products will ever get sales, which would lead to a lack of competition and all the negatives that come with that.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/once-...