Linus Torvalds, about AI, said that if people don’t like it they can fork it. Does anyone know any linux kernel forks that attempt this? Getting rid of “tainted” commits, even if that would mean going back in time a few years?
I don’t want to discuss the use of AI in the kernel. I am just curious and couldn’t really find any forks (only the linus quote pops up on search engines).
Are there any indications that AI other than the festering LLM-bubble ever added content to Linux?
I don’t need answers, I’m just interested in the question.
I am not a kernel contributor, but my IDEs have local LLMs for line based predictions for quite a while already and I use that. So if the involvement of any LLM is already the mark, then I would be guilty in a lot of work I did over the last years.
Personally I draw the line at accountability. If I contribute something I take responsibility and I (try to) make sure the quality is good. I expect the same from others. I don’t care how they got their result, as long as they can defend it.
That’s also why I am not a big fan of “assisted by Claude” and similar markers. It takes away accountability. “Whoops sorry, the agent did that”. No, you let the agent do that and didn’t care enough to validate or fix it.
As someone who is pretty anti AI in general, this is my personal opinion on FOSS projects. I fully understand and support people forking FOSS projects that have an AI policy they disagree with, but the community is so small and overworked as is I worry about further fracturing. I’m not a kernel contributor, so as long as they are keeping the same or higher standards, I’m not going to complain about where the code came from. I think your comment about accountability is really important and something I agree with as well.
Afaik thats also Linux Torvalds stance. It’s a tool, and it cannot be held responsible, that’s always on you
And I rather agree there. Don’t really care if you typed it in notpad without auto completion, or vibe coded it. I want you to understand your PR and be able to explain it.
Honestly I’m leaning more and more towards advocating for people to use AI responsibly instead of outright rejecting it.
Yes the environmental impact is insane, but I feel like that’s mostly because they keep pushing it to do more and more. But I think we’re well past the sweet spot of what work AI should take off our shoulders. Remove too much and you end up with Meat Proxies.
Tho that only applies to things where only the result matters, like code. Pragmatic stuff, that’s there to serve a specific purpose.
Art is the exact opposite. The process matters, the struggles, the successes, the setbacks. It’s a thing of passion, and that can never be truly replaced by a machine.
And that’s why a nuanced view to define what kinds of AI contribution are done with direct human involvement, oversight, and review to create high-quality code (yes, it is possible) and what kinds are problematic and dangerous is important. Both in defense of the Linux kernel project’s position, and in criticism of it. Otherwise I feel like everyone on both sides is just going to be shouting past each other with nobody actually ever reaching the point of how we are realistically ever going to build reliable and maintainable software going forward in a world where the AI pandora’s box has already been opened and and short of an absolute total war against the technology (which may be justified, but is not likely to happen and is not achievable or winnable from the efforts of a single project) it has been released into the wild and is not going away and people are not going to stop trying to use it.
Public shaming of AI usage is a valid strategy against its adoption and possibly the most viable one we have, but plenty of people are completely immune to it and will continue to be. It’s never going to stop it completely and maybe it’s a wasted effort. At the end of the day, the work still needs to get done, and arguing about how exactly it gets done simply isn’t getting any of the necessary work done.
Well, I guess it depends on your definition of AI here. Would a linear regression fitting a curve to inform decisions on allocation or scheduling count? I wonder if anyone has also tried to apply classifiers to commits.