The Problem Wasn't the AI

In Re: Linking Patchwork with Sashiko?, Linus Torvalds pushes back against treating the Linux kernel as an anti-AI project.

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

I hear this debated a lot, but if AI is supposed to help people do things they could not do before, we have to stop placing a stigma on everything created with it.

I recently saw someone use AI to create an interactive HTML guide for a new process. I was impressed that they had built something useful without waiting for a development team. The part that needed improvement was not how it was created, but how it was distributed and maintained.

That distinction matters.

We should judge AI-assisted work by the same standards as anything else: Is it correct? Is it useful? Is it secure? Can it be maintained? The tool someone used to get there should not automatically discredit the result.

Read Linus Torvalds’s full Linux kernel mailing-list post.