The anti-AI sentiment in the free software communities is concerning.

No, it is because people in the Linux community are usually a bit more tech-savvy than average and are aware that OpenAI/Microsoft is very likely breaking the law in how they collect data for training their AI.

We have seen that companies like OpenAI completely disregard the rights of the people who created this data that they use in their for-profit LLMs (like what they did to Scarlett Johansson), their rights to control whether the code/documentation/artwork is used in for-profit ventures, especially when stealing Creative Commons "Share Alike" licensed documentation, or GPL licensed code which can only be used if the code that reuses it is made public, which OpenAI and Microsoft does not do.

So OpenAI has deliberately conflated LLM technology with general intelligence (AGI) in order to hype their products, and so now their possibly illegal actions are also being associated with all AI. The anger toward AI is not directed at the technology itself, it is directed at companies like OpenAI who have tried to make their shitty brand synonymous with the technology.

And I haven't even yet mentioned:

• how people are getting fired by companies who are replacing them with AI
• or how it has been used to target civilians in war zones
• or how deep fakes are being used to scam vulnerable people.

The technology could be used for good, especially in the Linux community, but lately there has been a surge of unethical (and sometimes outright criminal) uses of AI by some of the worlds wealthiest companies.

You can't do machine learning without tons of data and processing power.

Commercial "AI" has been built on fucking over everything that moves, on both counts. They suck power at alarming rates, especially given the state of the climate, and they blatantly ignore copyright and privacy.

FOSS tends to be based on a philosophy that's strongly opposed to at least some of these methods. To start with, FOSS is build around respecting copyright and Microsoft is currently stealing GitHub code, anonymizing it, and offering it under their Copilot product, while explicitly promising companies who buy Copilot that they will insulate them from any legal downfall.

So yeah, some people in the "Linux space" are a bit annoyed about these things, to put it mildly.

Edit: but, to address your concerns, there's nothing to be gained by rushing head-first into new technology. FOSS stands to gain nothing from early adoption. FOSS is a cultural movement not a commercial entity. When and if the technology will be practical and widely available it will be incorporated into FOSS. If it won't be practical or will be proprietary, it won't. There's nothing personal about that.

There are already a lot of open models and tools out there. I totally disagree that Linux distros or DEs should be looking to bake in AI features. People can run an LLM on their computer just like they run any other application.

I get that AI has many problems but at the same time the potential it has is immense, especially as an assistant on personal computers

[Citation needed]

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS AI models so that we don’t become obsolete.

And this mentality is exactly what AI sceptics criticise. The whole reason why the AI arms race is going on is because every company/organisation seems convinced that sci-fi like AI is right behind the corner, and the first one to get it will capture 100% of the market in their walled garden while everyone else fades into obscurity. They're all so obsessed with this that they don't see a problem with putting in charge a virtual dumbass that is constantly wrong.

Maybe we'd be warmer towards AI if it wasn't being used as a way for big companies to steal content from smaller creative types in order to fund valueless wealth generators.

Big surprise that a group consisting of people rather than corporations is mad about it.

just a historical factoid that a lot of people don't realize: the luddites weren't anti technology without reason. they were apprehensive about new technology that threatened their livelihoods, technology that threatened them with starvation and destitution in the pursuit of profit. i think the comparison with opposition to AI is pretty apt, in many cases, honestly.

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS

In addition to everything everyone else has already said, why does this have anything to do with desktop environments at all? Remember, most open-source software comes from one or two individual programmers scratching a personal itch—not all of it is part of your DE, nor should it be. If someone writes an open-source LLM-driven program that does something useful to a significant segment of the Linux community, it will get packaged by at least some distros, accrete various front-ends in different toolkits, and so on.

However, I don't think that day is coming soon. Most of the things "Apple Intelligence" seems to be intended to fuel are either useless or downright offputting to me, and I doubt I'm the only one—for instance, I don't talk to my computer unless I'm cussing it out, and I'd rather it not understand that. My guess is that the first desktop-directed offering we see in Linux is going to be an image generator frontend, which I don't need but can see use cases for even if usage of the generated images is restricted (see below).

Anyway, if this is your particular itch, you can scratch it—by paying someone to write the code for you (or starting a crowdfunding campaign for same), if you don't know how to do it yourself. If this isn't worth money or time to you, why should it be to anyone else? Linux isn't in competition with the proprietary OSs in the way you seem to think.

As for why LLMs are so heavily disliked in the open-source community? There are three reasons:

1. The fact that they give inaccurate responses, which can be hilarious, dangerous, or tedious depending on the question asked, but a lot of nontechnical people, including management at companies trying to incorporate "AI" into their products, don't realize the answers can be dangerously innacurate.
2. Disputes over the legality and morality of using scraped data in training sets.
3. Disputes over who owns the copyright of LLM-generated code (and other materials, but especiallly code).

Item 1 can theoretically be solved by bigger and better AI models, but 2 and 3 can't be. They have to be decided by the courts, and at an international level, too. We might even be talking treaty negotiations. I'd be surprised if that takes less than ten years. In the meanwhile, for instance, it's very, very dangerous for any open-source project to accept a code patch written with the aid of an LLM—depending on the conclusion the courts come to, it might have to be torn out down the line, along with everything built on top of it. The inability to use LLM output for open source or commercial purposes without taking a big legal risk kneecaps the value of the applications. Unlike Apple or Microsoft, the Linux community can't bribe enough judges to make the problems disappear.

AI is mostly just hype. It's the new blockchain

There are important AI technologies in the past for things like vision processing and the new generative AI has some uses like as a decent (although often inaccurate) summarizer/search engine. However, it's also nothing revolutionary.

It's just a neat peace of tech

But here come MS, Apple, other big companies, and tech bros to push AI hard, and it's so obv that it's all just a big scam to get more of your data and to lock down systems further or be the face of get-rich-quick schemes.

I mean the image you posted is a great example. Recall is a useless feature that also happens to store screenshots of everything you've been doing. You're delusional if you think MS is actually going to keep that totally local. Both MS and the US government are going to have your entire history of using the computer, and that doesn't sit right with FOSS people.

FOSS people tend to be rather technical than the average person, so they don't fall for tech enthusiast nonsense as much.

As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it's like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn't work. I still don't understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

Sure, they'll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they're running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we'll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that's been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they've read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I'll think we'll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

That's not to say we're not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don't think LLMs will allow for that.

tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn't as on board with

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS AI models so that we don’t become obsolete.

lol no thanks.

You should read up on what the luddites actually fought for. They were actually based af.

One of the critical differences between FOSS and commercial software is that FOSS projects don't need to drive sales and consequently also don't need to immediately jump onto technology trends in order to not look like they're lagging behind the competition.

What I've consistently seen from FOSS over the 30 years I've been using it, is that if a technology choice is a good fit for the problem, then it will be adopted into projects where relevant.

I believe that there are use cases where LLM processing is absolutely a good fit, and the projects that need that functionality will use it. What you're less likely to see is 'AI' added to everything, because it isn't generally a good solution to most problems in it's current form.

As an aside, you may be less likely to get good faith interaction with your question while using the term 'luddite' as it is quite pejorative.

A lot of mentions of AI from companies is absolute marketing bullshit. And if you can't see that you don't want to.

The first problem, as with many things AI, is nailing down just what you mean with AI.

The second problem, as with many things Linux, is the question of shipping these things with the Desktop Environment / OS by default, given that not everybody wants or needs that and for those that don't, it's just useless bloat.

The third problem, as with many things FOSS or AI, is transparency, here particularly training. Would I have to train the models myself? If yes: How would I acquire training data that has quantity, quality and transparent control of sources? If no: What control do I have over the source material the pre-trained model I get uses?

The fourth problem is privacy. The tradeoff for a universal assistant is universal access, which requires universal trust. Even if it can only fetch information (read files, query the web), the automated web searches could expose private data to whatever search engine or websites it uses. Particularly in the wake of Recall, the idea of saying "Oh actually we want to do the same as Microsoft" would harm Linux adoption more than it would help.

The fifth problem is control. The more control you hand to machines, the more control their developers will have. This isn't just about trusting the machines at that point, it's about trusting the developers. To build something the caliber of full AI assistants, you'd need a ridiculous amount of volunteer efforts, particularly due to the splintering that always comes with such projects and the friction that creates. Alternatively, you'd need corporate contributions, and they always come with an expectation of profit. Hence we're back to trust: Do you trust a corporation big enough to make a difference to contribute to such an endeavour without amy avenue of abuse? I don't.

Linux has survived long enough despite not keeping up with every mainstream development. In fact, what drove me to Linux was precisely that it doesn't do everything Microsoft does. The idea of volunteers (by and large unorganised) trying to match the sheer power of a megacorp (with a strict hierarchy for who calls the shots) in development power to produce such an assistant is ridiculous enough, but the suggestion that DEs should come with it already integrated? Hell no

One useful applications of "AI" (machine learning) I could see: Evaluating logs to detect recurring errors and cross-referencing them with other logs to see if there are correlations, which might help with troubleshooting.
That doesn't need to be an integrated desktop assistant, it can just be a regular app.

Really, that applies to every possible AI tool. Make it an app, if you care enough. People can install it for themselves if they want. But for the love of the Machine God, don't let the hype blind you to the issues.

Great technology is invisible.

As long as AI is advertised as being a unique selling point, I'm not interested.

If you think of specific problems it is better to point them out and try think of solutions, not reject the technology as a whole.

Yes. There a problems with the Gnome desktop environment. Without looking at the issue tracker, I can assure you that AI is not the solution to any of them. Even if AI may be a possible solution to a problem, it would probably not be the best one.

Good.

The Luddites were right.

Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively.

Because whenever AI is mentioned it usually isn't even close to what AI meant.

i think firefox shows that ai can be used right, to help with accessibility.

i think the problem with ai is when companies use it as a buzzword instead of actual innovation by just cramming a bunch of ai into their product to do a bunch of niche things.

Imo you immensely overestimate the capabilities of these models. What they show to the public are always hand picked situations even if they say they dont

The Linux community has never been of one mind on anything. We have always been against, and for, everything.

Some distro or project will integrate AI, or not, and it will be forked. And then forked again.

Many AI models are run on Linux. Linux won't be left behind in any real sense. Linux won't lose market share over this.

Linux developers paid by AI firms will integrate it into products. Those that volunteer will make their own decisions.

personally im fine with machine learning, what I don't like is "AI", a new marketing buzzword that justifies every shitty corporate exec decision and insane company evaluations.

There is a this app called upscale, that uses an ML model to upscale images. It's Quite good at what it does, it's useful. I use it frequently. So, there are AI stuff in linux. Just not your myopic view of AI (LLMs). And your analogy with printing press is extremely wrong. Other than human errors, printing press didn't have have remotely as many errors as LLMs. LLMs have not evolved to the point of causing a a revolution. So linux has plenty of time to see if the bandwagon sinks or sprints.

People who consciously use and support F/LOSS usually do it because they look at software with a very critical eye. They see the failures of proprietary software and choose to go the other way. That same critical view is why they are critical of most "AI" tools -- there have been numerous failures attributed to AI, and precious little value that isn't threatened by those failures.

I think most of the hostility is in regards to shilling of certain sites and services. Local self hosted AI is not likely to get as much flack I feel. Another aspect of hate is people generating images and calling it art, which...it is but, it's the microwave equivalent of art. Such negative sentiments can be remedied by actually doing artistic shit with whatever image they generate, like idk, put the image into Photoshop and maybe editing the image in a way that actually improves it, or using said image as a canvas to be added onto or some other shit.

Edit Addendum: also the negative perception of AI has mostly been engendered by some of its more unpleasant supporters, who think of it as a way to make "irrelevant" certain groups they don't like, and to take some sorta sick schadenfreude in the "replacement" of these people, which they think may be a way of reducing the power of these people (politically, socially, etc), and that's kinda fucked up.

General Ludd had some good points tho...

As I mentioned in another comment we have an example of something like an ai-less desktop anology wise. gui-less installs. They are generally called server version of the distro and are used in datacenters but im 100% sure there are individuals out there running laptops with no gui. Im find with FOSS ai and there are LLM's licensed as such. That being said they are still problematic since the training requires large amounts of data that companies are not exactly strigent with collection.

I'd argue that if you exactly call the model you refer to by their actual name, you'll get much different reactions. For instance, expert systems have been around for a long while.

Testing AI (knowledge system) was the first job out of college for me in the '90s (I used to be a programmer). I'm not against it, but I don't like it in my feet either. I like using the operating system all by myself, or generating things on my own. Especially now that I'm an artist, I like painting on paper. I even dislike digital art (I find it flat), let alone generative art.

AI may be useful in some cases (ask Mozilla) but it is not like what you said in the middle part of your post. Seeing the vote rate makes me feel a tiny bit better about this situation.

This article should be ignored.

“Good moment” for apple to announce their AI shit

AI isn't a magic bullet. Sure it has it's uses, but you have to weigh it's usefulness to the ideology behind a project and it's creators. Just because a software developer or community doesn't embrace AI doesn't mean they will be "obsolete."

AI is the current trend that is being shoehorned into everything. I mean literally everything. I don't think we need AI touching everything.

I don't want or need AI crammed into my desktop environment. And I surely don't want it interjecting into my filesystem with my data. It is a privacy concern. And many of other people will feel the same or similarly as I do.

AI is a tool, and with all tools: use the appropriate tool for the job.

free software communities

TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube

LOL

AI has a lot of great uses, and a lot of stupid smoke and mirrors uses. For example, text to speech and live captioning or transcription are useful.

"Hypothetical AI desktop" "Siri" "copilot+" and other assistants are smoke and mirrors. Mainly because they don't work. But if they did, they would be unreliable (because ai is unreliable) and would have to be limited to not cause issues. And so they would not be useful.

Plus, on Linux they would be especially unusefull, because there's a million ways to do different things, and a million different setups. What if you asked the ai "change the screen resolution" and it started editing some gnome files while you are on KDE, or if it started mangling your xorg.conf because it's heavily customized.

Plus, every openai stuff you are seeing this days doesn't really work because it's clever, it works because it's huge. Chatgpt needs to be trained for days of week on specialized hardware, who's gonna pay for all that in the open source community?

Edit: actually, read zerakith's comment instead.

Try to think less about "communities" and maybe you will be happy.

You're mid right, the when something AI based is announced this is really criticized by some people and there are almost right. When something new pops, like windows recall, it is certain that this "new" feature is really not what AI is capable, and asks really important questions about privacy. But you're right on the fact that Linux should be a bit more interested on AI and tried to made it the right way! But for now there's no really good use cases of AI inside a distro. LLMs are good but do not need to be linked to user activities. Image generators are great but do not need to be linked to user activities... As exemple when Windows tried Recall and failed. Apple iOS 18 wants to implement that, and this should be surely a success inside the Apple minded people. But here where FOSS, privacy and anti Big-Techs guys are the main people that's absolutely sure that every for-profit "new AI" feature would be really hated. I'm not against this mind just giving facts