this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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Linus is, as usual, a pragmatist. And he's right. All the bitching and gnashing of teeth over AI is ridiculous. If it produces good code then you should accept that code.
People will bitch and complain about 'slop' but the kernel team has processes in place to manage and review code from thousands of sources. They know what they're doing.
Nobody serious is going to say "just accept AI created code without review!" That's tech-bro BS. Quality software engineers know to adopt tools cautiously and deliberately.
If you're going to argue people should accept AI code (what people ought to do) then you've entered a moral argument. People are free to argue about when the code is good 'as in useful' but naturally that's not as important as when the code is good 'as in morally good'.
I value software freedom, and copyleft licenses like Linux's GPL for protecting it. While AI generated code cannot be copyrighted then it cannot be licensed under a free software license. It can legally become proprietary. You ought not accept "good" AI code.
pick one
People can take "your" non-copyrighted code and ignore any copyright license you could try, and fail, to enforce in court.
It's funny how you pretend this is a 'moral' issue but then just end up with a copyright law conclusion.
This is a concern - though the legal question is still a bit open on this. The question has been around how much human involvement there has been. A purely "create me a photo of a cat" prompt generating a picture of a cat has very little human involvement (fully AI generated).
A "generate some code to do this, no make it do it this way, rename these variables, etc." prompt "conversation" may be treated differently by the law. We don't know yet.
It makes no sense to say to someone what they "should do" without the part where it's helpful to them flourishing or avoiding missery (i.e. morality). This can be expanded to include others in purely selfish terms.
There are no moral issues to AI if we ignore all negative ways it's creation (and use) affects people. Typical AI-creator take advantage of others' works on-mass while we've punished normal people harshly for far less infringement/social violations.
If the purpose of copyright is about encouraging human creativity then the AI generated elements which are clearly seperatable from human input should not be copyrightable? There can be creativity in writing promps but the resulting code output is not itself creative?