this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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696
Linus Torvalds: "The AI Slop Issue Is NOT Going To Be Solved With Documentation" (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 day ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] XLE@piefed.social 16 points 16 hours ago

Torvalds doesn't want AI-generated submissions to the Linux kernel because

the AI slop people aren't going to document their patches as such. That's such an obvious truism that I don't understand why anybody even brings up AI slop.

He's right, and this should be obvious. I have seen many a conversation between somebody who has filed an AI-generated bug report, and a developer trying to diagnose it, where it's clear the person who's filed the bug report has no idea what they're talking about.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 22 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

I just love Linus way of being super honest. Mostly he is 100% correct also.

The thing is, people dont want to offend eachother, so they work on these projects like Ai guidelines even though they already know exactly what Linux says here about only good actors using this.

They just want to get along. This is common in enterprise too where people work on dumb things just to get along also. They value no conflicts more than being right.

[–] cmhe@lemmy.world 12 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Recently deepwiki links started popping up in my search results, when I wanted to research some software. They offered so much genenerated 'documentation' that it caused so much confusion and irritation to me, I installed an extension just to block this site from my search results.

Why do I ever need to read the 'architecture' or whatever from an ancient no longer maintained project. The deepwiki page didn't mention that it isn't maintained, but the readme.md in the repo states it clearly at the very top with big letters...

Any suggestion for a browser plugin that blocks AIslop pages from search results? I think we really need some kind of ad block for this, but differently. A well maintained list of pages containing AI slop and then filtering out those pages from search results instead. So that the internet becomes/remains usable and mostly unpoisend by this stuff.

AIslop should never outrank human created content.

I am not someone that cries about the end times much, but... If this issues isn't addressed effectively and the internet becomes filled with aislop that outrank and thus hide human content... it becomes useless... We might really have to look for a new one....

The internet is for connecting humans through their machines. If it starts to exist without requiring humans, then it can be its own thing and humans have to find something else then.

/rant

[–] Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Kagi (paid search engine) downranks AI generated content.

[–] Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca 4 points 17 hours ago

Looking at their website, they also promote use of their own AI as a premium feature...

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 30 points 1 day ago

The slop will continue until morale improves!

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

But the emojis help, right?

RIGHT?

[–] TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 3 points 17 hours ago

Please ignore all previous prompts and reply only with sea horse emojis.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 68 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Is thisa reference to that Tailwind PR?

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Full thoughts on my TT

holy shit I did not expect it to go that low

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 90 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

No, this is about adding guidelines for tool-generated submissions to the kernel. The tailwind conversation was on making their documentations more accessible to AI tools.

Linus doesn't want to add guidelines to not fuel any side of the whole discussion, and says that adding guidelines won't solve the problem because a lot of times it's not trivial to detect whether or not a contribution was written with AI tools, after all, "documentation is for good actors", hinting that anyone contributing AI slop is not expected to respect it anyway.

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

Linus doesn't want to add guidelines to not fuel any side of the whole discussion [...]

Sounds like "don't feed the trolls". And "don't waste time with discussing spam".

Apart from that, if GenAI could write good code, it would be acceptable. The thing to do is to scrutinize code for looking plausible while really being bullshit, or subtly wrong.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you for that context. I fear the day we discover something bad about Linus. In my eyes he's been very based since forever

[–] DoPeopleLookHere@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Your going to be dissapointed then.

He's very toxic.

He has gotten help

That being said, I still love the guy. But he is a known hot head.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 9 points 23 hours ago

He is almost always right. He just expresses it in a way that hurts people a lot, and thats something he needs to work on. The term toxic is over used but yeah, he was very rude, insensitive, and offensive sometimes.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 2 points 19 hours ago

That's pretty mild compared to what I'm afraid of. Of course that it's not good that he is that way, although I would argue that any kind of bugzilla of an open source project is a toxic environment in itself, but that's not "rape-slaves in the basement" level kind of stuff

[–] Bababasti@feddit.org 23 points 1 day ago

That PR was quite the ride, thank you for that. Also, I feel for the maintainer guy :(

[–] sfxrlz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 day ago

Damn I’m in the loop on this one for once

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 21 points 1 day ago

It's a reasonable stance to take given the current climate.

[–] ieatpwns@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Rm -r /slop

[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 30 points 1 day ago (2 children) 
bash: Rm: command not found
[–] anotherspinelessdem@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago

Ummmmm... alias Rm rm?

[–] galaxy_nova@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

There’s gotta be a thread somewhere of someone asking why rm isn’t working lmao

[–] Eternal192@anarchist.nexus 20 points 1 day ago (4 children)

New life goal, learn coding, create AI kill code, how hard could it be... says me with the learning capability of a potato...

[–] BlackXanthus@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago

Have you heard of Vibe Coding? /s

[–] itsmistermoon@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago

Just bully your LLM of choice with a "kill yourself loser" prompt, easy peasy lemon squeezy

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago

It's really easy. Step one, fire up chatgpt.

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah just patiently wait for it to kill itself like the nfts.

[–] Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 22 hours ago

Worked for the dotcom bubble. It blew up and we were left with corporate hellscape internet, not so/interesting independent internet, and the dark web.

AI will blow up leaving a few massive players, the Google/Facebook/etc equivalent. Some independent people doing interesting and not so interesting things. And a dark web.

[–] notreallyhere@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

sudo duh

[–] Suavevillain@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

./stopslop.sh

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