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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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apparently many people's stance on ai is "ai is bad unless my idol uses it". there is not intellectual discipline, suddenly they are willing to ignore all the other problems with ai: jod lose, excessive energy use, training on stolen data, preying on vulnerable people, exacerbate wealth inequality and concentration of power. and let's not forget the ones that apply specifically to Linus: diskilling and ai psychosis.
"b-but linus reviews his code!" 🤦
Are you sure you're not mixing up different people with different opinions with opinion changes of some people?
This Lemmy guy is horribly inconsistent.
Linus Torvalds has fucking lost it.
Going from chewing out someone for committing dumb AI code to becoming an AI techbro himself. How the mighty have fallen.
LLMs have proven time and time again to be a cognitohazard. It just sucks people in like a drug.
correct
Apart from the de skilling and psychosis thing. That's up to you
Here's mine: the world would be a much, much better place if LLMs did not exist. Also, it would be stupid--today--to not use LLMs to find flaws in the Linux kernel. The only other option is to get your machines compromised.
Pretty much. It‘s a really shitty situation and it would be better if the world decided to not use them and sanction them. A bit like nuclear weapons that are also far more effective than alternatives but too destruktive to seriously consider. For now, many developers are doomed to use LLMs for security reasons. Because LLMs are not just a tool. They are an entire production line at the grasp of your hand. Just using complex architecture to obscure risks doesn‘t cut it anymore.
I mean you know about tactical nukes and uranium ammunition
I’m not a huge fan of AI but comparing them to nukes is wild
I like to compare them to meth. Sends velocity through the roof...with just a few minor drawbacks... 😅
The environmental implications of the data centers fuelling the LLMs will undoubtedly end more lives than nuclear weapons ever have
You got a reference for that?
I mean 5 years ago the world was shit with no llms so no ?
5 years ago things were bad, therefore there's no way LLMs can be bad. Is that the argument?
The world was bad, it will be worse thanks to LLM. Both things can (and IMO, are) be true at the same time.
Using LLMs for security auditing? Ok, but people are mad that LLM-assisted code, tons of it, is now getting into the kernel and Linus is no longer slamming the brakes...
The only other option is to use something inconvenient like OpenBSD, constantly audited for three decades, LLMs could find only very few obscure bugs.
I also think this is a bad idea unless we want less stability in the kernel. I've seen Torvalds call people all kinds of names for trying to add things to the kernel that he feels are subpar. He's legendary for it. So I'd probably trust him more than any human alive to avoid slop.
But I also don't think he has the power to effectively defend against it. Some badness will get through.
As always, we'll choose the least-crappy OS to run.
Oh buddy... Did you not hear that not only did OpenBSD start using AI for audits but that it actually found a handful of serious issues that decades of human audits have missed?
There is a difference between an AI doing a security review (which they have become quite accomplished) and generating code that gets committed into the codebase.
Again, how does one verify that the code it has generated isn’t some verbatim chunk of copyrighted code that it happened to be trained on, and it turned out to be the best fit? There’s no guarantee that a model will not do this, even if instructed.
Also, content generated by AI models has already been deemed uncopyrightable, and this includes code. So are some larrtsmof the Linux kernel now able to be copied freely without GPL restrictions? How can you license code or executables compiled from said code if you do not hold the copyright on it?
I guess I should've quoted the whole part, as my primary point was to show that not only did AI spot niche, obscure bugs... it spotted niche, obscure bugs that HUMANS couldn't.
And what if someone has a genius idea and comes up with a piece of code, completely on their own, and it turns out to be the exact same, verbatim, character by character matching as a copyrighted piece of code?
What if AI does this? What if the model wasn't even trained on that piece of code, but, by sheer coincidence, it puts together the same solution because it's the most obvious and best option?
Copyright and licensing in code is already a weird topic because mechanical problems often have the same solution. There's a finite (and in fact, usually very low) number of ways you can run the same algorithm or represent the same data. Say you have to implement a key-value storage system. No requirements on it needing to support millions of entries, historical caching, snapshotting, anything, expectations are simple: a command to add an entry (and update the value assigned to the key, if the key already exists), a command to delete an entry, and a command to get the number of stored items. Wanna bet that if you give this task to 1000 developers of the same language, a large majority will write nearly the same code? Hell, if you don't consider inconsequential things like variable/field/property/function naming, there's good chance 90%+ of them will write the same thing. Woukd that be plagiarism though? Would copyright apply?
On the other hand if you were to write and release a book that is verbatim the same as another, famous book, with the only difference being the names of characters and places... Well I guess you can see where I'm going with this.
You could already copy small enough parts of the Linux kernel without needing to cover yours in GPL. Trivial things for example. Say you have a driver that talks to sone niche hardware in a specific data packet format. Can you copy/recreate that? Or a trivial solution like the aforementioned cache. GPL doesn't mean you can't copy a single line of code without your codebase becoming GPL too.
Oh btw that copyright claim is much weaker than you'd think. It didn't specify the level of human involvement for example. Also, given the base code is GPL and human written, and GPL applies to all derivative works, it still applies.
The comment you replied to had absolutely zero to say about licensing and rights issues, yet your entire reply is only about that.
You lost?
Not everything needs to be about winning or losing
Pretty sure that was "lost" as in, "needing a map." Not everything needs to be about winning or losing.
And conversely, many people seem to have a "the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus" stance.
Many people on Lemmy will start to crash out the moment you suggest AI is anything other than pure evil
It’s not the algorithms people oppose, it’s the way they are trained within a capitalist system (infringement of many copyrights without compensation), they way they are being marketed as a living mind that can basically befriend us and take a mental load off of us (they can’t and it’s problematic to humans who allow them to try), and they way they’re being used an excuse to buy up the wntire world’s capacity for computing so that rich tech oligarchs can force us all onto the cloud services for all computing in the future.
I think if at the very least they weren’t bulldozing people’a home and poisoning their drinking water in order to forever capture all technology and then rent it back to us we might have a more favorable view of the possibilities, but so far Big Tech has done almost nothing but try to find ways to make individuals and enterprise addicted to their Mechanical Turk in order to take advantage of us.
Please tell me about how you were poisoned.
I haven't been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it's gradually getting a bit better here. There's still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I've been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it's just naturally getting more diverse.
I just consider the weight of their argument and ignore the votes. We have basically no defense against sock puppet alt accounts, some of which could be LLMs.
As long as nobody is being like a personalized salesman of AI and getting it in everyone's face, I think it's okay. I still find AI as a useful tool. But I also don't see AI as an everything-solve-all kind of tool. It has its limits and I've seen them by experience.
I mean it's kind of undoubtedly a miraculous and game changing technology. Anyone who isn't completely blown away by it doesn't realize the implications imho
The problem about AI right now is multi-pronged.
But the main key problems are;
It's costing people's jobs. In a way, this is of no surprise because before AI, there were shitty bosses and CEOs. They were always there and they will always find any excuse, if any, to release you from your job. AI only merely accelerated it.
Data Centers/AI Plants take too much water. I like how people conveniently forget today, how much water companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle actually take while turning around, bottling said water, just to sell it back to you. And if anyone has watched How It's Made, you can find arguments everywhere in that series, about how much resources are taken to make everything we use.
My point is, is a lot of arguments that people bring up against AI, there's such a wedge of counter-arguments in them that negate the problem of AI itself. It's just demonized because people are disappointed that AI isn't magically fixing roads and potholes, I guess, I don't know. Society doesn't know what they truly want anymore out of anything, it's just the feeling in the moment of the current 'I want said thing' dominates their mindsets.
But the actual problem with AI shocks no one - shitty CEOs.
I've agreed with Linus on a lot of things over the years. This is not one of them.
But I hear what you're saying, and we're not talking about me.
I see the "unless my idol uses it / unless someone good uses it" as a deeply human thing. For me it's the other side of the coin from not harming oneself in discussion, even if a valid point was brought up.
Few great people do that.
Nope.
The crucial fact here is: like it or not, Linus decides what Linux is. As we've done for 30+ years, we decide whether we accept his project as-is. Otherwise, we move on.
It doesn't get more complicated.
No one decides what linux is. Linux is literally open source. You have no idea what open source means if you think open source means one person owns Linux.
Just because it's open source it doesn't mean there's not a person or group of people deciding what happens to the 'main'/'upstream' version of it.
Sure you can fork it, and remove all AI contributions, but who will use your fork?
When people say "the Linux kernel", they mean the version maintained by Linus Torvalds. They might mean a fork for a specific SoC or manufacturer or distro, but those are all just the Linux Kernel maintained by Linus Torvalds plus a few patch sets. There's no considerable divergence.
Linus' stance was initially "no AI written code". And he does have final say in what goes into the repo he maintains. Now he's changed that tune, he allows AI written code, and no matter how many forks you make to strip it out... what matters is Linus' upstream.
This actually should be done. Let there be options. But the human fork won't magically return you to the previous world of no-AI. AI will still audit it and find vulnerabilities humans can't. Time will tell which version prevails, but I think at best the human fork will have only a niche use. Perhaps in education.
Linus has decided what Linux is & isn't since forever. It has his fucking name on it for a reason. Linus decided Linux means AI code so Linux has AI code now. No way around it. We can only pick until a specific version of the kernel when no LLM was used but after that the future Linux Kernelf will forever have LLM code in them.
No distro is going to stop using new kernels, everyone downstream is essentially powerless on this decision. The Linux Foundation is HUGE compared to 90% of the distro's workforce (volunteers). Only IBM & Canonical surpass it & they are NOT going to maintain the next Linux fork for the next 30 years.
Likuc maens AI code now and for the foreseeable future. To my demise.
Your read on that was very different than mine.
Linus controls Linux. Anyone who disagrees with how he runs it is free to fork it because the source is open.
But good luck maintaining a Linux kernel fork for any length of time unless you’ve got lots of contributors lined up and a solid maintenance structure ready to deploy. It worked with LibreOffice and OpenJDK, but it’s failed with far more projects than it’s succeeded with.
It's like there's nuance that deserves to be acknowledged or something. Weird.
I don't like him and I don't like AI.
Have you seen this? https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives
Fucking love that they listed pretty much every single programming language that is used today, leaving only esoteric shit.
On a personal level I get it... but as a professional, good fucking luck trying to find a job without using any of those languages, not to mention the plethora tools.
I'm rather glad I've gotten out of tech.
I expect AI is going to come for every role there is and turn it into being a prompt monkey.
However, I can always turn a wrench!
Ai isn't going away... It's like a nuclear arms race. The government won't let it go away... They need it and will do anything locally and globally to solidify ai (and digitizing life) as the modern foundation of governing.
If people don't want ai, they should be completely boycotting their nations. Votes don't reach this level of need. "Need" as in the government would even sacrifices its own people to reach the goal. For all we know it's the whole reason America had trump as president.... So they could distract and implement the social and psychological strategy of easing into the upcoming modern foundation.
It's not just "the government won't let it go away." Users won't let it go away.
I find AI to be incredibly useful for running my coding agent, for example. I run it myself on a local machine. Every AI company on Earth could go bankrupt tomorrow and I'd keep on chugging away with it. Lots of other enthusiasts and smaller companies making use of it would do likewise.