jesus christ… it’s been said over a million times, the development of the linux kernel is not some fucking 5 star github repo. it goes through a shit ton of review, it’s seen by a lot of eyes. a small piece of text that says it was assisted or not by ai is irrelevant if the code is good or not, which is the work of maintainers to decide.
On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.
All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.
So then the person who doesn’t put that in, doesn’t get reviewed. Are you dumb enough to think everyone well follow the rules?
For the third time; “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is not the argument you think it is.
On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.
All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.
Why are you assuming that everyone would honestly disclose AI use if it was a rule?
The honest ones that would disclose it to say “this needs more eyes, guys” can still do just that. The dishonest ones that would hide AI use will do exactly that whether it’s a rule or not.
The only difference here is there’s no punitive action to follow for non-disclosure because that would be a gigantic waste of time when, AI or not, all code needs to be reviewed anyway.
I have to say the same thing I said to the other commenter; I’m really not sure that “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
I have to say the same thing I said to the other commenter; I’m really not sure that “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
Nice attempt at spin but relies too much on readers having room temperature IQ to believe that’s what my argument is. And just to be clear, by ‘Nice attempt’ I’m being sarcastic.
because there is no guarantee the code will be wrong per se. should junior developers need to disclose this fact, then? because according to your logic their code could be wrong! furthermore, there’s the fact people will do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of you raging on an internet forum about disclosure. people might not even read that shit because they don’t give a fuck. so you end up with half assed policy which you cannot enforce. job well done, let’s go home boys.
Junior developers’ code always goes through more review, yes. Also, I’m not sure “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
no, people who have never contributed to the linux kernel are “flagged” simply because maintainers have never seen this person, but there’s no “junior developer disclosure policy”. you could be a senior dev who simply is contributing for their first time. you could be receiving ai assisted code by very old contributors, for example, which in the eyes of the maintainers is a certain feeling of trust precisely because that person has a history with the project. i think your comprehension skills are poor, since that’s not what i said. my argument is that a policy that cannot be enforced and as argumented also provide very little gain, is not doing much at all. if a policy does nothing, what is the purpose of this policy?
In their eyes it does something though it gives them something to rage about.
but why remove it ?
Because rules have to be enforced, and investing time and effort into detecting and punishing rule-breakers would be a pointless endeavor when, disclosure/AI or not, all code has to be reviewed anyway.
According to Linus it’s free advertising for the AI companies (wowe look at how much code Claude (partially) committed buy le Anthropic now!) and also people don’t disclose all their other tools either so this is just an exception which can be removed. And I bet there’s going to be a ton of LLM based reviewing on all code that’s submitted to double check for potential bugs anyway.
Anyone who is allowed to work in the Linux kernel isn’t going to (be allowed to) push random slop.
maybe we should ask the maintainers, since it’s they’re the ones where this disclaimer could be useful or not. :)
Because it’s literally advertising for LLM companies. Because certain news sites conclude from it that “AI did $thing” instead of “engineer did $thing, using whatever tools they found useful”. Because you can’t actually enforce it, which makes the tag completely useless.
Any of these reasons is good enough on its own.
It’s been said a billion times: you don’t get to decide what I find relevant. The only reason these clowns want to hide their behavior is because they’re ashamed of the criticism. There is no other reason to hide attribution, your patronization notwithstanding.
the developers of the linux kernel, people who have probably been coding for at least 20 years, are clowns.
I don’t understand. Being moral is irrelevant?
yes, the Linux kernel would probably accept patches from Al Qaeda if it was a good patch and they were allowed to by most governments.
Completely this.
As long as the code is good,. does it matter where it came from?
Yes, fuckstick. That’s the whole point to a lot of people.
I swear, the level of smugness of AI true believers is totally inappropriate.
we’ll be waiting in the grown ups room while you figure out how to answer the question “why?”
Why is it that every single time you see someone trying to claim the role of ‘adult in the room’, they appear to be speaking from a perspective of being perfectly oblivious (albeit sometimes for the purpose of obfuscation)?
Even if you disagree with them, people who oppose LLM usage for ethical reasons still exist for example.
You aren’t making yourself seem above it as you would like, you are making yourself look unable to intellectually engage with the concept.
What I find funny do the people who oppose llms for ethical.reasons also oppose every other tech they use for ethical reasons.
Why is it that every single time you see someone trying to claim the role of ‘adult in the room’, they appear to be speaking from a perspective of being perfectly oblivious (albeit sometimes for the purpose of obfuscation)?
Did you miss the part where OP’s entire argument was ‘fuckstick’?
Yes, fuckstick. That’s the whole point to a lot of people. I swear, the level of smugness of AI true believers is totally inappropriate.
Sure, but calling people fuckstick isn’t used on a large scale to shut down conversation, there is a qualitative difference here.
Edit: I belatedly see your point that it could have been directly in response to that, in which case the pattern recognition was misfiring and I apologise.
Sure, but calling people fuckstick isn’t used on a large scale to shut down conversation, there is a qualitative difference here.
Maybe if ‘fuckstick’ was followed by a coherent argument. But instead of providing one, OP just continues to throw insults about their reasonable perspective somehow being ‘smug’ in some way. I’d call that childish too.
the discussion of ethics is irrelevant as long as we live in capitalism. there’s not ethical consumption under capitalism, using ai is no different from eating chocolate or drinking coffee. you’d be surprised by the amount of slave labour that’s used today. now, if you oppose because of technological limitations, such as water/energy consumption, this is a very different topic and it’s not an ethical one, which to be honest is not even a very valid argument since it has been solved by open local models. then you might have an issue with the corporations behind some models, but that’s not an issue with “AI”. i also dislike the west, but to be AI is not israelgpt.
I don’t need you to tell me any of this, much less in such a condescending way, I am perfectly aware of how the world works. It does, however, amount to a rhetorical sidestep, and I know how it goes from here. Have a good one.
This decision baffles me.
Has anyone thought about what AI code does to the license of each file it’s used in?
If AI code can’t be copyrighted does it also follow that it can’t be protected by copyleft rules?
Do I have to make ai source available when I reuse some part of it in my project?
This should be a real concern for commercial software, maybe not Linux, but all the vibe coding game studios should lose copyrights on things that AI codes.
I have also been thinking about this, because as far as I know you’re correct - at least under US copyright law, AI output is not copyrightable, and since you don’t own it you can’t license it. All AI code is public domain (again, at least in the US). It’s surprising to me that there has been little discussion about this, and Linus himself has not addressed it
I think Linus is probably being pressured by the corporate lobby that funds his org. And I think with the bubble inflating out of control, the tech bros are desperate to push AI really hard down everyone’s throats.
I guess, as he suggested, it’s time to fork it.
the hardest part is to come pu with a good project name and mascot.
- Snoorlox
- Iguana
As some one here summarised it: it is to stop AI companies from getting free advertisement and endorsement, the kernel itself goes through an unbelievable amount of scrutiny so the disclosure requirement was irrelevant
That would be solved by removing public mentions of ai companies in the ai disclosure notice.
What would be the point of jumping through these hoops in the first place? As OP pointed out, the disclosure requirement is itself irrelevant due to the amount of scrutiny the code goes through. So we’re forcing disclosure to… shame AI users? Discourage its use?
If the use and inclusion of LLM derived output is truly defensible, why would you need to conceal its provenance or existence?
The debasement and solvency of competency wrought by the unbridled abdication to responsibility to such an incompetent construct is beyond depressing, this Is truly a world no longer worth inhabiting.
Who said anything about concealing it? Not making a disclaimer mandatory and concealing something are two different things.
From the point of view of a reviewer, the code of the PR is all that matters. You shouldn’t look at who wrote the code or what tools they used.
If the code is slop, it does not matter that a human or an AI wrote it, it is slop. Same if the code does what it’s supposed to do and has a high enough quality to pass review.
The question is why it matters in the first place. As long as the person submitting code takes ownership of the code, and there is a review of the code being done the same as before, nothing actually changes. Your whole line of argument is absurd because it’s premised on the idea that we can trust code produced by a human more than code produced by an LLM. And that’s obviously not true because humans make mistakes all the time. So, the focus on how the code was produced is fundamentally misguided. The focus in any successful project is on validation through things like code reviews, specifications, testing, and other well established practices. That’s what responsible teams have always done.
To me, it matters because the use and reliance on LLMs demonstrably erodes cognitive capacity and ability, and submissions tainted by them should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, which can only be facilitated with a consummate element of transparency. That elevated scrutiny could, and probably should, also be applied to non-LLM infected submissions, but doing so wouldn’t negate the labelling of authorship.
Good faith proponents of LLM assisted tooling should be in favour of overt transparency and labelling, as it’s a requirement to facilitate future historical analysis of their utility, efficacy, and legitimacy; you know, to build a body of evidence.
I assume you’re citing a couple of studies with tiny samples that have been going around here. There’s very little solid evidence to support the claim that LLMs demonstrably erode cognitive capacity. But if you have large scale, peer reviewed studies definitively showing this to be the case feel free to share them.
People lose certain skills working with LLMs, but that has always been the case with automation. Very few people know how to write assembly by hand, and practically nobody knows how to operate punch cards. Yet, we hardly claim that there was some loss of cognitive capacity as a result. People just spend their time focusing on different things now.
And I’ve already explained to you why the focus on the tooling is deeply misguided. You ignored my points entirely, which tells me that you’re not actually trying to have a discussion in good faith here yourself.
To me it matters because if you got code from someone else, you’d probably want to credit it to them, right? So why shouldn’t LLM output be treated the same?
LLM is a tool that a human uses, do you also credit your IDE when you write code?
My IDE does not write the code for me, at most it autocompletes words.
The LLM works on the exact same principle as autocomplete does. You’re just drawing an arbitrary line on technology you’re used to.
True in some regards, however the word completion in my IDE is only active when I’m typing new code in, it only picks words that already exist in the code (along with language specific keywords, etc). It never types the following word for me, and I have to manually accept the completion I want. It is inactive when I’m typing comments in, and so on.
The LLM you tell to write you a function, and it writes the whole thing, comments and all. It’s not quite the same. The original GitHub Copilot was closest to traditional IDE completion though, and there if it wrote a whole long function for me I’d definitely give credit where it’s due.
It’s a different workflow, but all LLM does is just more automation. The intention and the ideas still come from the developer, just because the tool automates the work of typing out code doesn’t really change anything. Nobody who’s done any serious software development thinks that typing code is the important part of coding.
Anyone who believes, and confidently espouses, that the autocomplete from the dictionary included in an IDE is functionally indistinguishable from the function and output of a LLM, is betraying a foundational lack of understanding of either. The former is constrained and deterministic, whereas the latter is explosively imprecise and intrinsically unreliable.
You keep invoking the notion that LLMs are merely tools, and should be treated as mindless subservient instruments deployed by a programmer in command. The thing, however, with tools is they can often trivially become weapons if wielded with incendiary intent, or indiscriminate instruments of destruction under the direction of incompetence.
Skill is acquired through use over time. LLMs are far too new for anyone to have legitimately accrued enough experience which could be mistaken for competence. With this in mind, anyone claiming to know what they, or the model they’re poking with a prompt, are doing, is a charlatan.
Anyone who makes lazy straw man arguments is betraying utter lack of intellectual integrity. Nowhere did I say their output is indistinguishable, what I actually said is that they work on the same principles. These are both stochastic systems.
The LLMs are very obviously mere tools that are instruments programmers use. Every tool can be wielded as a weapon, there’s nothing unique about LLMs in this regard. I also have no idea what this has to do with AI use disclosure which is the context for this thread.
How LLMs work is well understood, and that’s a completely different subject from how to use them effectively as a skill. With this in mind, the person who can’t even make a coherent argument, and keeps conflating unrelated things, is the actual charlatan here.
It would be interesting if this results in Linux being forked or perhaps even more interesting developers and users opposed to AI moving to GNU Hurd or any of the BSD variants.
good luck with that. software development has changed and it will never be the same. you will not be able to achieve the level of security required without ai assistance, you can’t beat a machine. and this is something you’ll see everywhere and is the tip of exponential curve.
I feel like we are moving into the acceptance phase.
Atleast NT is not vibecoded yet, not sure about BSD.
If NT is refering to the windows kernal then I got bad news for ya
The userspace is 30% vibecoded as the world has seen with w11 on a daily basis jajaja.
NetBSD has a clear stance on no ai.
As much as NetBSD takes a stand against AI, it’s not banned. They just said AI code has to be signed off by the core team.
LLM code can be committed with “written approval by core.” https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html#%3A~%3Atext=written+approval
Also Haiku OS and Ironclad OS
NT isn’t open source too. So nobody cares about NT.
Good
