Exactly. While I do have issues with the ethical and environmental aspects of AI, I do believe that many of the criticisms are disingenuous. Some made me wonder if the one criticizing never worked in a real dev project and just parroting

Bad developer have been copy pasting from stack overflow, writing slop, not following documentation/standards for years. This will never go away.

AI can do amazing good stuff, keeping the exit criterias checked, act as a second opinion, verifying upstreams and helping building a good prototype. making harnesses, hell even find a forgotten RAII pointer or concurrency.

But it can also lead to making gibberish that no one understands, mess up with productivity factor (if someone do code fast, why dont you??) and many other issue.

I think its all about approaching how we can gatekeep the bad code, instead of trying to pin how it was made.

Exactly, that's the only rational way to look at it. The person submitting the code is responsible for it. Period. How they went about producing it is their own business, but they are the one who takes ownership of the result.

Torvalds has never been a Free Software guy. Open source is a convenience to him. Why should he allow blobs in the kernel otherwise? They do the job and arguably don't violate the GPL. That's all he's ever been concerned with.

Software that’s “just a tool” can lock you down and out of what you can do with it.

AI is not “just a tool”. It is highly unethical.

It harms the environment, it harms actual developers, it introduces all sorts of legal issues where copyright is only one of them, it locks you in to a vendor, it makes you dependent of giant tech companies that steal your data and want to monetize your work.

Linus seems to ignore that or does not care about it.

Do explain how open models like Qwen that you can run locally give massive control to handful of companies. In fact, what seems obvious is that using and improving these models is precisely what takes control away from these companies. People who started the free software movement didn't cry like a bunch children about how much they hated software. They had the brains to understand the problem wasn't the software itself, but rather who controls it. So, they went out and built open versions of the software that weren't corporate owned. And try guess what tools they used initially to do that since open software didn't exist yet. Your mind is about to be blown.

These risks are not different from before and still open source has the advantage of being open to anyone and any agent.

Kernel modules written by US employees with unknown ties to US intelligence was just as much at risk for containing a backdoor as if written by an agent using an LLM with US intelligence ties.

And in both cases intelligence actors or security researchers from around the world can review it all and try to spot backdoors. So can agents with different LLMs behind them.

It would be an issue if there was only one state sanctioned LLM available, but as long as there is world wide competition in training LLMs, opensource will be “reviewed” with competing interests in “mind”.