My Country Is Under Sanctions: A Story of AI Adaptation
When sanctions in Belarus cut off access to paid AI tools, the author discovered the free sidebar extension
It’s been almost two months since I moved from Thailand to Belarus, and quite a few things have happened that I’d like to share. Finding myself in a country affected by sanctions, on the one hand — lost certain services, and on the other — discovered something new regarding AI. It might be beneficial to know for you too.
Are you ready?
Let’s fly!
1. Quillbot won, Grammarly lost.
When I arrived in Belarus and started writing an article about my life changes on Medium, I was very surprised to find that my paid Grammarly subscription was being terminated.
I wasn’t angry, but I was slightly disappointed, to put it mildly.
You see, I had purchased a premium Grammarly subscription in Thailand, where I had been living and working. However, in Belarus, I was met with a message stating that, due to the conflict in Ukraine, I could no longer use the premium subscription I had paid for.
I found this quite amusing, especially since I still receive emails from Grammarly about how their service is beneficial for education, and maybe I want to sign up for it.
It’s so nice of them.
I felt like I was being spat in the face with a certain amount of cynicism. It’s just ridiculous. Yet, every cloud has a silver lining.
It turned out that QuillBot allowed me to continue using a premium subscription without any issues. I was grateful to QuillBot for maintaining this service.
I could confidently say that in my personal ranking, QuillBot emerged victorious over Grammarly because QuillBot continued to provide the service I paid for regardless of my IP address. Moving forward, I will never buy a premium subscription to Grammarly again, and you can guess why.
2. ChatGPT — No, Sider — Yes.
In Belarus ChatGPT is also blocked for the residents of Belarus. Probably I could use VPN and somehow bypass these restrictions, but why all these complications?
If it’s not, then it’s not. And if it is, then it is. That’s the beauty of life, my friend!
Nevertheless, I found an advertisement for a certain sidebar where I could use ChatGPT 3.5 without any problems. I immediately installed this extension for myself on Google, and I really liked it.
It was love at first sight.
I didn’t write about it earlier because I didn’t see the point. My audience has unfettered access to ChatGPT for sure, but a couple days ago I discovered certain advantages of that app that set it apart from others.
The thing is that when I’m overwhelmed with emotions, I write poems, songs. Let me tell you right away that I wrote poems in my youth, some of them I even published on the portal stihi.ru
I may not have been the greatest poet, but at least I had a thick diary. Gotta give me points for consistency, right? I had a very thick diary, which was full of poems, written with tears and laughter ... rather with tears, though.
The process of writing was enjoyable, but what followed next was not.
The point is that I wrote the poems to girls, but they didn’t believe that I wrote them myself, “Where did you steal them? What kind of poet are you pretending to be? What book?”
Ahhhhh!
I guess my poems were so good that they thought I must have stolen them from the poetry greats. Yet, it didn’t make me happy at all. I was like the Banksy of the poetry world.
Ha-ha-ha! It’s a bit funny to me now, yet, when I think back on it … it was very painful.
You see, I had been writing these poems for a very long time, as there were no AI helpers like ChatGPT back then, and it was very painful to hear such words. I was basically accused of not having the brains to write something like that.
You might argue, “Wait a minute! But is that a compliment then? Right?”
Well … Technically, it might look like a compliment from some point of view, but I don’t think you’d be thrilled with such a compliment either. I was very upset to be told that.
It should be noted that there are some joys to being a poet in the digital age. At least I don’t have to worry about my poems getting lost in the mail.
So I published some of my poems on the most popular Russian-language poetry site, and among them is an acrostic one named “Акростих 1”. I liked writing complicated lyrics, which developed my brain, I guess.
“Acrostic?”
Yes, an acrostic is when the first letter of each line eventually forms a word or sentence. In addition, I made sure that not only did I keep the rhyme, but that there was meaning in what was written beyond the code phrase:
Who needs a love letter when you can just write an acrostic poem? Instant romance, guaranteed. Not in my case, though, ha-ha.
Maybe I should have started an acrostic poem business. The above-mentioned poem could be a nice promo:
“Let’s talk the other day!” — Say goodbye to your lenders beautifully.
“Let’s talk the other day!” — That’s a service worth paying for! 🤭
Well, as you see, I used to write about feelings in a flowery style, declaring my love and all that fancy-schmancy stuff, but recently I decided to experiment with writing poems.
Profound acrostic poems still can’t be written by AI, at least in Russian. So I decided to try writing poems with very short lines that I could use for songwriting in the future.
I should say it’s quite a challenging task, and it took me a long time to write some short and meaningful lines with a great rhyme but without AI as an example. So, I was determined to find a way to write such poems with some help from AI.
“Yet, how? How could you do it without ChatGPT in Belarus?”
Well, the most exciting part has begun.
Once upon a time, I stumbled upon an unknown extension called Sider, which allowed me to use some popular AI in one app. So, I set out the app to compare all the available AI writing assistants, hoping one of them could help me achieve my vision.
Even though the old versions of AI are free, the latest versions are available for paid users only. Please, look at the extension below:
Unfortunately, the free versions of those AIs fell short — I was still able to write much better poems in Russian myself, much-much better. It’s important to note that AIs generally struggle more with poetry in Russian compared to English.
Undeterred, I then heard about a new, super-duper AI in version Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I decided to give it a try, setting the same parameters I had used earlier and providing an example of my desired writing style based on my poetry.
To my surprise and delight, it worked out!
The AI wrote exactly as I wanted, capturing the meaning I intended and doing so in rhyme. Since that moment, I fell in love with the Sider and decided to share this extension with you.
You know, there are actually a ton of features in the Sidebar extension that I haven’t even touched yet. Yet for now, I’m still happily using the free version, and I’d definitely recommend you try it out too.
Besides, I found out that if I share a referral link — I get 5 free requests for advanced AI tools, the same as people who registered using a referral link. The point is that if you register without a referral link, you don’t get 5 free requests for the advanced AI.
Even though I am not sure why I need those free requests for now, it’s a win-win deal if you register using a referral link anyway.
Thus, thanks to my country being bathed in sanctions, I parted ways with paid Grammarly and made friends with freebie Sidebar. I’m not bragging about it, and to be honest, I’d rather use the original old buddy ChatGPT, which made my life more comfortable. However, I’m not sure it makes sense now because Sidebar is very convenient.
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