“Useful” is not sufficient

So Linus Torvalds, head of the Linux kernel development, put his foot down on the Linux Kernel development mailing list when someone was bringing up criticism of LLMs: “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issueswith that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s nolonger in question today. There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it willactually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one ofthose questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually usedit.” Linus Tovalds This is an argument we do often hear: That LLMs’ usefulness cannot be debated and therefore they are just “tools” that need to be accepted and that just need some proper governance or social norms and individual vigilance. This is presented as sort of the killer argument for the use of…