I mean its use as a tool, maybe in a small business context. The individual can be the “visionary” giving their idea for a book to a de-facto ghost writer. AI’s will often give you back info that confirms your ideas, so its like any other tool. If I am not good with a hammer then I smash my fingers and if I’m not good with AI then I convince myself the earth is actually flat.

You might check out coreboot and PCs that support it https://www.coreboot.org/end_users.html

This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the “I wish I could do ____. but _____” ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer “a thing”. This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We’re at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.

If they’re tracking web use by PCs they know are not servers, then it’s likely due to a combination of local AI computer web scraping and people using SteamOS devices, which are running Linux. Prosumer local AI users often learn Linux if they don’t already know how to use it, because the software runs more efficiently on it. Anyone with a Steamdeck or Linux distro like Bazzite copying it on the desktop can exit to desktop mode and use it like a normal PC.