The headline focuses on the wrong thing. Making a bunch of crappy songs and uploading the to Spotify and other streaming services is perfectly legal, AI or not.

The illegal part is that he created lots and lots of fake accounts that constantly streamed his songs and masked them to look like authentic listens. So much so that he was making $110k per month. That is straight-up fraud, which is what he was arrested for.

It has nothing to do with AI, but that makes more people click on the article.

Thing is, it already was ubiquitous before the AI “boom”. That’s why everything got an AI label added so quickly, because everything was already using machine learning! LLMs are new, but they’re just one form of AI and tbh they don’t do 90% of the stuff they’re marketed as and most things would be better off without them.

I know you said you’re biased against it, but TeamViewer is dead easy and completely free for noncommercial use. Sometimes the normie way is the best way, especially when it comes to the tech illiterate. Similarly, Chrome Remote Desktop looks very handholdy. I haven’t used it in many years, so I can’t personally recommend it, but I’ve heard good things.

You could also start a call on your preferred conferencing software, send them a link, and have them share their screen. Downside is you can’t control their computer directly. Zoom has a really cool annotation feature where you can draw on the sharer’s screen and they’re able to see it. I haven’t seen other conferencing software with that feature, but I haven’t looked very hard.

If you’re worried about unauthorized access to the physical machine, you could always just do disk-level encryption instead or store the app’s data in something like a Veracrypt virtual disk. They’d still be able to access the data if they go through your OS/user, but wouldn’t pick anything up by accessing the drive directly.

Nothing short of E2EE can truly stop someone from accessing your data if they have physical access to the server, but disk encryption would require a targeted attack to break, and no host is wasting their time targeting your meme server. I seriously doubt they’d access it even if you had no encryption at all, since if they get caught doing that they’d get in a heap of legal trouble and lose a ton of business.