So Linus Torvalds, head of the Linux kernel development, put his foot down on the Linux Kernel development mailing list when someone was bringing up criticism of LLMs:

“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.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no
longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used
it.”

Linus Tovalds

This is an argument we do often hear: That LLMs’ usefulness cannot be debated and therefore they are just “tools” that need to be accepted and that just need some proper governance or social norms and individual vigilance.

This is presented as sort of the killer argument for the use of LLMs: They have proven to be so super useful. As if that was a good argument.

Usefulness is not an objective, fully abstract property: A thing is not useful for everyone or in general but mostly just for specific people in specific contexts. And useful never comes for free.

But let’s take a step back and use a different example: Child labor. Child labor is very “useful” if you want cheap labor. It’s 100% deplorable to use it or accept it. Child labor is a monstrosity. But if “useful” is enough, do we need to accept child labor? Palantir surveillance software is useful to some. Building closed source proprietary software is useful (for the people selling it). Usefulness is a very weak argument in support of something.

Sure people consider LLMs useful, otherwise they literally wouldn’t use it. But that’s not a get out of jail free card.

Especially when it comes to free software, it’s weird when the main characters totally ignore the political and social context of technological objects: Many people use Linux not because it’s the best but for political reasons, for reasons of autonomy or to be part of a community.

But now we know where Linus stands. If something is somehow useful (to you? to Linus? I don’t know who it has to be useful for) it’s okay to use. I wonder what the stance is on using decompilers to generate code from proprietary drivers or operating systems and just paste them into the Linux Kernel? It is basically the same. Code of dubious legal standing being thrown into a codebase built around a free license. But just decompiling and copy pasting is so fucking useful.

In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough.

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