I saw this counterpoint on Mastodon and I think it sums up things rather well: https://hachyderm.io/@chris_e_simpson/116925250364867462
Child labour is such an excellent comparison to use against the “if it is effective why not use it” argument.
And watch the billionaires nod in agreement to more child labor lol
I really want to link this article here as a counterpoint - why “AI is just a tool” as a stance doesn’t quite cut it as far as well-founded opinions go: https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/05/just-a-tool.html
i think most people here conflate ai with data centers. datat centers exist with out ai and you can use ai without data centers. local ai fills a lot of needs and in the next two years there will be more home hardware to run it. nvidia just announced a new consumer chip , coming out later this year, to run models at home.
in my eyes, the bubble has always been paying a company to use their ai. sure it has places for science and medicine but most of us dont use it for that.
so AI is a tool, how its used or implemented is the problem.
That was unnecessarily wordy to express only two complaints:
AI causes environmental damage and AI was created by scraping content that the AI companies didn’t own.
Did you read the whole thing? It’s about a lot more, such as corporate control, economic hardship, and alienation. It’s not a long read and you don’t have to care or agree with the author, but this is a disservice to their post.
This blog post is a wandering train of thought on the topic of what tools are and why it matters to be even slightly more mature in how we think about them.
That’s the second sentence, and it’s fairly clear that the author means to start the discussion of the titular topic, not to conclusively explore every ail of AI. Of which there are many, yet enumerated.
Some people call this “food for thought”; I would agree.
You can have a wandering train of thought without writing 2500 words repeating the same two ideas over and over and over.
He’s not wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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?
