this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

“Good moment” for apple to announce their AI shit

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think we should be chasing all the trendy trends to become competitive with the competition. That's the only way to push those numbers up (that need to be pushed up). That's how a winner wins.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

But does Linux have to "win"? And if so what they "wins"?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I imagine it might happen one day. But at present, I don't really think that most computers are at a point where they can utilize it without the use of proprietary cloud technologies that aren't considered to be ethical nor financially sustainable. And even if people's computers could fully handle things themselves, there would still need to be a group of developers with enough knowledge to actually implement it.

Consumer AI has always been pretty limited in most Linux desktops. Heck, I'm still waiting for a Desktop Environment to one day have a nice implementation of Speech-to-text like Windows and macOS.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I've yet to see a need for "AI integration ✨" in to the desktop experience. Copilot, LLM chat bots, TTS, OCR, and translation using machine learning are all interesting but I don't think OS integration is beneficial.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'd make a comment but I'm banned from lemmy.world

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I s👀 you

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I'm on a different instance, I think that let's me see all of the Internet's sides.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Dammed impressive. How evil AI is managing to post defending itself.

I for one will be happy to bow to our new AI overlord.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Edit: actually, read zerakith's comment instead.

[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You're getting a lot of flack in these comments, but you are absolutely right. All the concerns people have raised about "AI" and the recent wave of machine learning tech are (mostly) valid, but that doesn't mean AI isn't incredibly effective in certain use cases. Rather than hating on the technology or ignoring it, the FOSS community should try to find ways of implementing AI that mitigate the problems, while continuing to educate users about the limitations of LLMs, etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

One comment that agrees 🥲

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

It's spelled flak, not flack. It's from the German word Flugabwehrkanone which literally means aerial defense cannon.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Oh, that's very interesting. I knew about flak in the military context, but never realized it was the same word used in the idiom. The idiom actually makes a lot more sense now.

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