Protect Your Images: Free Stock Photography Sites That Allow AI Training

If you contribute and upload photographs to popular free stock photography sites, you should opt-out of this AI training setting. Otherwise, these companies can use your creations to train their own models or sell it to another company which does so. I will be covering several sites in this post, please comment if there are other sites worth adding!

Pixabay

Appears in your account settings (after Notifications)

https://pixabay.com/accounts/settings/?tab=account

Pexels

Within your account settings, scroll down to the bottom

https://www.pexels.com/edit-profile/

Unsplash

This site doesn't currently have a setting to opt-out

(Bonus) Canva

https://www.canva.com/settings/privacy-preferences

I will make a sepertae post for other websites (besides stock photography) that have similar settings 

My favorite AI LLM and Tools

I frequently use the following AI tools and sites. I wanted to compile a list of them for simple and quick access for myself (and maybe you too). Next to each listing I also included what I find unique and/or useful benefits these offer.

Most of these have a free tier (and paid as well). 

LLM/Chatbots

• ChatGPT - the leading multi-modal (import, pictures, files, or use audio) chat bot
• The paid plan lets you create your own bots and offers additional functionality
• Google Gemini - multi-modal (import pictures, files, or use audio)
• Also has "plug-ins" that connect to other google products
• Claude - multi-modal (import pictures or files)
• Poe - grants you access to many different assistants (some are multi-modal)
• You can also make and monetize your own bot, like FinanceTipsBot (my bot)
• Perplexity - multi-modal (import pdfs)
• this operates in a similar regard to a search engine 
• Le Chat By Mistral - late comer to the game but it integrates web-searching, image creation, and allows for file uploads
• Thetawise - AI math tutor (LLM Based), allows picture, audio, and sketches to be uploaded too

Coding

• Github Copilot - works as a plugin to most IDEs to help you generate code and comments
• Free for students (sign-up with the GitHub Student Pack), paid for everyone else
• Cody AI Chat - I use this when I code with VSCodium (a fork of VSCode without telemetry)
• Also works with Jetbrains IDEs and via the web
• Google Colab - modified Jupyter notebook hosted on google's servers, and you can run code with their GPUs. Recently, they integrated AI autocompletion  
• Additionally, you can use it 

Media Generation

• Adobe Firefly - text to image or generative fill
• Suno - generate music (and album art) from text
• NotebookLM - generate "podcasts" based on PDFs and other research papers

Other

• FUTO Live Captions - FOSS, offline Linux application to create live captions. 
• ChatGPT via Phone Call (US Only) & Whatsapp -  1-800-ChatGPT (1-800-242-8478)
• You cannot call from *67 or with private caller id. You are allotted 15 minutes a month via phone call.
• ChatGPT cannot be added to whatsapp group chats

Getting app the app IDs for my watch active 2 with tizen and how to launch an app easily

 

Get app package names and open applications dynamically on a Tizen Wearable device!

Developing apps for Tizen devices can be annoying... All of the samsung smart watches up to the Galaxy Watch 4 all run on Tizen OS... Newer devices thankfully run on Android Wear... This guide is for the older wearable devices. 

Assuming you have debugging and developer options enabled... and installed the Tizen Device Manager.

You can click on your device

and click "open shell"

now you have the SDB on the device...

type pkginfo --listapp 

alternatively, this command will also list the packages pkgcmd -l

If you do not want to go via the GUI, open command prompt (via CMD or terminal) and run sdb connect "IP of your device" (without the quotes. then write sdb shell, and now you can also type whatever commands you like 

and now i have a lot of info on the apps installed!

I put the list on my github page, if you want to check it out as well: https://gist.github.com/avipars/bf4ebf3efa1bcceb77025b8b9159a6df

Here is some C# code that you can use to launch any package programmatically: 

        async Task openApp(string packagename)

        {

            Tizen.Applications.AppControl myAppControl = new Tizen.Applications.AppControl();

            myAppControl.ApplicationId = packagename;

            try

            {

                await Task.Run(() => Tizen.Applications.AppControl.SendLaunchRequest(myAppControl));

            }

            catch(Exception e)

            {

                status.Text = "Failed to launch: " + e.ToString();

           

            }

        }

and you enter the package name as a string... you will need to enable this privledge though to actually use this 

"appmanager.launch" in tizen manifest to actually launch another app or even the settings panel