Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETWhen AI first hit the scene in its current form, I was dead set against it because of the generative nature of what was being sold to the public. I considered any shortcut to creating art to be offensive to the craft.But then I realized I could use AI for something that traditional searching was starting to fail at: Research. Also: Claude AI can do your research and handle your emails now – here’s howWith both sides of my writing career (fiction and nonfiction), I have to do quite a bit of research, and Google was becoming a hindrance to that process. Instead of being fed helpful information, I was inundated with ads, sponsored content, and its own AI-based answers (which were rarely helpful). I first kicked the tires with Opera’s Aria, which showed me that AI could actually be helpful. At the same time, I realized that AI also had to be supervised because it could be wrong as easily as it could be right. I also found another helpful thing about AI in that it could lead me down some fun rabbit holes, where I might discover something really cool to investigate. Ultimately, that journey led me to two AI tools, both of which could be installed and used on Linux for free. Those two tools have helped me get more done on a daily basis. 1. Ollama/Msty Ollama is an open-source AI tool. Its open-source nature is one of the primary reasons I was drawn to it because I know developers around the world can vet its code, and to date, no one has come out to say they’ve discovered anything untoward in the code. On top of the open-source nature of Ollama, it’s just easy to install and use. And the fact that you can download and use several different LLMs is a bit of delicious icing on an already sweet cake. I can use Cogito, Gemma 3, DeepSeek R1, Llama 3.3, Llama 3.2, Phi 4, QwQ, and many more. Also: How I feed my files to a local AI for better, more relevant responsesBut the main reason I prefer Ollama over any other AI tool is that it can be used locally, which means my queries aren’t accessible by a third party. I like that level of privacy. But how does Ollama help me get things done? First, there’s the prompts library, which gives you access to several quick prompts and even allows you to create custom prompts. One prompt I often type is “Do a deep dive into the following topic and make sure to explore any relevant side topics:”. Instead of always having to type that prompt, I can create a quick prompt for it, so all I have to type is the subject matter. On top of that, I don’t have to remember to prompt Ollama to explore relevant topics. Also: How to run DeepSeek AI locally to protect your privacy – 2 easy waysI create that quick prompt within the library so I can easily call upon it whenever I need. This saves me time and ensures I always get the prompt right every time. I don’t have to think about what the prompt needs to say, and I can make the prompt as easy or complicated as I need. More
