this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
-177 points (26.3% liked)

Linux

48329 readers
1381 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively. Creators like TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube always feel the need to add a disclaimer that "some people think AI is problematic" or something along those lines if an AI topic is discussed. 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 (just look at what "Apple Intelligence" seems to be capable of.) Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS AI models so that we don't become obsolete. Using an AI-less desktop may be akin to hand copying books after the printing press revolution. 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.

TLDR: A lot of ludite sentiments around AI in Linux community.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] edinbruh@feddit.it 2 points 5 months ago

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?