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Linus: Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. (lore.kernel.org)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 11 points 3 months ago (5 children)

The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side.

We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.

And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.

Linus is, as usual, a pragmatist. And he's right. All the bitching and gnashing of teeth over AI is ridiculous. If it produces good code then you should accept that code.

People will bitch and complain about 'slop' but the kernel team has processes in place to manage and review code from thousands of sources. They know what they're doing.

Nobody serious is going to say "just accept AI created code without review!" That's tech-bro BS. Quality software engineers know to adopt tools cautiously and deliberately.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    If you're going to argue people should accept AI code (what people ought to do) then you've entered a moral argument. People are free to argue about when the code is good 'as in useful' but naturally that's not as important as when the code is good 'as in morally good'.

    I value software freedom, and copyleft licenses like Linux's GPL for protecting it. While AI generated code cannot be copyrighted then it cannot be licensed under a free software license. It can legally become proprietary. You ought not accept "good" AI code.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's funny how you pretend this is a 'moral' issue but then just end up with a copyright law conclusion.

    While AI generated code cannot be copyrighted then it cannot be licensed under a free software license.

    This is a concern - though the legal question is still a bit open on this. The question has been around how much human involvement there has been. A purely "create me a photo of a cat" prompt generating a picture of a cat has very little human involvement (fully AI generated).

    A "generate some code to do this, no make it do it this way, rename these variables, etc." prompt "conversation" may be treated differently by the law. We don't know yet.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    It makes no sense to say to someone what they "should do" without the part where it's helpful to them flourishing or avoiding missery (i.e. morality). This can be expanded to include others in purely selfish terms.

    There are no moral issues to AI if we ignore all negative ways it's creation (and use) affects people. Typical AI-creator take advantage of others' works on-mass while we've punished normal people harshly for far less infringement/social violations.

    If the purpose of copyright is about encouraging human creativity then the AI generated elements which are clearly seperatable from human input should not be copyrightable? There can be creativity in writing promps but the resulting code output is not itself creative?

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