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Linux kernel devs drop obligatory confession of AI tool usage
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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This is the kind of arguments people made against the free-software movement in the first place. That it's somehow more mature to not care about consequences of what we do and how we do it
I think it's exactly the other way around
The difference is that free-software movement is about rolling up your sleeves and actually making alternatives as opposed to throwing a tantrum like spoiled children which is what you all are. You lot are just a modern day iteration of Luddites who were raging against the technology as opposed to social relations that resulted in the technology being used in abusive ways. And lacking basic understanding of the problem you are doomed to fail the same way as your predecessors.
The comparison to the luddites is interesting as you're tacitly saying "no you guys are right but your fucked anyway".
There is no good end with this technology. None. It will be used to abuse the working class, it will alienate workers from their labor, and it will bring an enormous amount of harm to vast numbers of people. This technology gives nothing in return for this loss except the ability to consume faster.
These discussions never focus on the fact that this tool optimizes the, already, most efficient part of the human supply chain, ideation and design. This tool does not make any of the other bottlenecks that slow human progress faster, those being implementation, adoption, and translation of solutions to different environments. The human race had the tools to solve world hunger shortly after the invention of nitrogenated fertilizer; yet here we are. The human race created a source of nearly infinite clean energy with negative temperature-coefficient fission reactors; yet here we are.
But you're ultimately right. The luddites lost, we'll lose, and we're fucked.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. The Luddites were highly skilled workers, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to substitute for their own skill. So, they set to work to burn the factories down thinking that if they could destroy the machines, the problem would be solved. But technological advances could not be stopped by mere vandalism. The Luddites ultimately failed in their efforts because they failed to grasp the material forces driving the march of history. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The evils of the Industrial Revolution grew out of the possession of the means of production which grants the power to determine how technology is used. The same is true today, and it is why similar attempts to boycott AI are doomed to fail. Those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.
It is not the inherent qualities of machinery that should be condemned here, but rather the class relations within which it happens to be applied. This is precisely what Marx articulated showing that technology does not exist as an isolated phenomenon, but is dominated by the social structure of the society in which it happens to occur. To control the means of production collectively is to make technology serve human needs rather than merely increase the profits of the rich. That is the very lesson that the Luddites missed, and that a great many critics of AI are missing today as well.
The rational strategy for those who have come to the conclusion that corporate AI cannot be trusted, which is itself very much a correct one, should be to focus their energy on ways to develop this technology outside the stranglehold of corporations. We already have a powerful example in the form of open source software. And with the release of Chinese model weights, there is a solid foundation to build upon.
The more open models are used, the less demand there will be for the proprietary ones. These models are the tools that people can run on their own machines, and under their own control. Developing and using open alternatives to paid APIs cuts directly into the profits of the corporations renting out LLMs. A mere boycott will not alter the balance of economic forces or change the status quo. If you want to resist, do it constructively by encouraging the use and development of this technology in the open.
While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger's human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.
We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is fun :)
But do we even want to be workers? I don’t. I have to be worker.
We shouldn’t be fighting parts of a broken or rather unfair system, but the system. I don’t want to fight for my place at the bottom of a pit.
The issue with LLM's is that they cut as much muscle as they do fat. Work can take a lot of forms and surplus-value extracting labor and pro-social communal labor are often indistinguishable aside from the motivating force.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that work, that is to say "providing some useful function to others based on one's skills", has a large number of pro-social benefits. LLM's abstract an ENORMOUS amount of viable sources of "work" and therefor remove the incentive for people to rely on one another vice the tool.
Currently this is limited to repetitive white-collar work, software engineering, and being a mathematician but it would be foolish to think it stops there.
Humans are social animals and we have no model for what happens when there is no material reason to reach out to or rely on another human other than novelty. Genuinely, it would be better to restrict the use of LLM's to a select set of applications, weighing the costs and benefits of doing so, than it would be to carte blanche allow them everywhere.
Even in a communist utopia, this would be dangerous. The number one historical cause of violent revolution has been a glut of educated people who are unemployed or underemployed. This has been studied to death and one of the major findings is that it wasn't about the money, it was about status and identity. LLM's have the potential to create a population of incredibly educated and incredibly bored people.
It's suicide.
Interestingly I also think it’s suicide for capitalism as we know it. Ultimately the system works by having people earn their share by working, and using their income to consume various things (because you want and need more different things than you could possibly ever create on your own). Companies exist because people buy their stuff, and people can buy stuff because they work for it.
If LLMs end up helping build more with less labor while the system stays unchanged, companies get into trouble: while they produce more, less and less people consume their products. So what are they producing for? And how do they make enough money to warrant the production in the first place?
So something has to change anyway. No matter if capitalism or communism. I just don’t see how a fight against LLMs could help, because you can’t wipe away the concept or the means to apply the concept without wiping everything. And bringing upon The End is not a feasible solution to prevent a downfall; it’s merely speeding it up. So I would rather “watch” what happens and hope the system adjusts like it “always” did.
But the incentive structure is only present in the corporate versions of these tools. I'm advocating for building these tools in the open, and we don't have to mirror what corps are doing. I disagree that these tools are anti-worker at their core, they're just another form of automation. And we have a concrete example of what happens when this technology is introduced in a rational fashion with China.
Every form of automation will be used to alienate and atomize workers under capitalism, but it's obviously worse if these tools are also controlled by corporations which will decide who uses these tools and how they use them. While we continue to live under a capitalist regime, open source approach at least helps mitigate the worst ills. On top of that, it directly cuts into the business model of these companies.
Open models are what actually scares them and they state is plainly. We only have to listen to what these companies are saying themselves. They don't care about boycotts, or some online activism, but they are lobbying to ban open models, and that tells you everything you need to know.
I agree with you that an open-source ecosystem around LLM's is better than a closed corporate one but my argument is that having such an ecosystem eliminates the lesser of the risks surrounding LLMs.
My contention here is that an open-source environment prevents control of the technology by a small handful of companies but it does not change the relationship between the worker and the LLM, which is the bigger problem.
LLM's abstract reasoning, there is no higher function that a human can fall back to, they are there for purely substitutive with no replacement or complements. Because of this even a single-proprietorship faces intense labor alienation as a result of using the tool.
To be clear; the genie is out of the bottle. We have no way to go back, and that is horrifying. We are all actively watching entire fields die overnight and it's not likely to stop any time soon. Every day I mourn another dead craft and I will likely continue doing so until most knowledge work is replaced.
But the elephant in the room here is that the way LLMs are used is just a symptom of the underlying problem. And that's where the focus needs to be ultimately. However, until that problem can be solved, surrendering these new tools to capitalists would be absurd. There is already a power imbalance, and it would only get worse if we reject technology which the ruling class embraces.
They were not "against technology", that was the propaganda of the ruling class which still gets repeated today. The Luddites were put down by militarily and violently killed. They didn't fail because they weren't publicly supported (they were wildly popular) or weren't against the social relations (they very much were)
Building frontier AI models cost billions of dollars in capital. Any solution involves raising that kind of money, the forces of the money will be put right back against you. It's also just as likely to be banned if it's seen as a big enough threat.
The Luddites were skilled artisans, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to destroy their guilds. So, they set to work to smash the machines thinking that if they could destroy the technology, their artisanal guilds would be saved. And they were predictably crushed by state violence. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The same is true today, and those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.
Also, you're simply confusing the fact that the US is in a bubble with what it takes to develop new technology. Listening to you, one would think Linux could have never been developed because Microsoft put billions into Windows.
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report
Also, highly unlikely they would get banned, because there's a huge amount of capital in the US now being invested in companies using open models already. But even if the burger reich banned them why should I give a fuck, I don't live in that shithole.
Compute is the bottleneck for AI, not labor. Linux was able to develop more because of the labor being done by huge number of people for free and from those employed by other companies working on it. If AI keeps accelerating on the same trajectory, there is little reason to hope for it to get better as the models get larger and training costs get higher
The Luddites were not just smashing machines, they had a list of demands they were trying to build pressure for. They were also trying to get the rights for unions, strikes, abolishing child labor, minimum wages and the things like that which shifted powers back into the favor of workers. They had tried petitioning governments for that for a while before they started smashing things
If the US bans open-weight models, you don't think a large number of countries would be heavily pressured by industry to do the same?
I think the US banning open-weight/open-source models could be a real concern. Anthropic is certainly pushing for it with their weird self-propagating local open-weight worm in smart TVs narrative that makes little sense. But I don't think other countries would follow suit, because it wouldn't be in their interest, given that they are not currently in control of the frontier models and open models giving them an edge.
Remember SETI@home? If compute is the bottleneck, why shouldn't people all over the world get together to train their own models? Cyber security would be a concern, of course. Such a cluster could be misused. And the underlying question of copyright remains. But if lots of people were able to get together to create open-source software, lots of people can get together to train better, transparent models. The EU also offers free training clusters if you apply, if I'm not mistaken. I also read about an open-source LLM somewhere. Not only open-weight, open-source. Can't recall right now. Mistral 4 Large and Kolibri 1 are interesting open-weight models. Lots to come.
I also think that making the technology your own is the best way to tackle the big American corps and their proprietary models.
What part of distributed systems are you still struggling with here? Also, models are getting incredibly more efficient every few months. Qwen 3.8 that runs on a laptop today is comparable to Opus 4.6 from around half a year ago which needed a whole data centre.
People working on local models don't need to compete with whatever the big corps are doing, they just need to make tools that are good enough to use on your machine. Just the same way Linux didn't have to do everything Windows did to become usable.
And yeah, Luddites had lists of demands just you do, how's that work out for them?
And if the US somehow did ban open models, I'm sure the vassals would as well, but again who gives a fuck? The whole west is like 13% of the global population. And it's imploding economically and politically in real time. Who cares what goes on in this genocidal cesspool?
Based on your other comments across several threads which do not indicate good faith, I am not continuing this thread here
Ah yes, when you're unable to come up with any actual counter point just say that the detailed explanation of why you're wrong is not in good faith. Bye troll.
No, I just see no reason to counting talking to someone who keeps renaming valid criticism as "whining". There is no mind to be changed here. This is just conservative rhetoric while pretending to talk like a "leftist"
The particular policy you are defending by the way goes against all your argument about wanting open models. The policy to not even have to say what model you use, and yet you defend it just the same. There is no cohesive argument here
Yet, here you are continuing to talk without saying anything of substance. I also love how in your mind, actually doing something practical about the problem of corps owning AI tools is conservative. Amazing mental gymnastics there champ.
And I don't know what policy you think that I'm defending that goes against my arguments. But I guess we'll never know since you won't actually mention what it is.