I’m intent on getting rid of Ubuntu since their embrace of AI, and would prefer to avoid any other distro based on Ubuntu, since that’s just kicking the can down the road.
But a thorough search of the web for various versions of “Linux with no AI” only returns results that recommend AI infused distros and articles touting how great AI will be for Linux, or how to fix Linux using AI. 🤮
Can anyone recommend a distro that has proudly announced their refusal to ever consider adding #AIslop to their distro?
Simply saying “No AI” would forbid a huge amount of code that was written with assistive technologies that long precede the latest crop of proprietary LLMs; I’d venture it would cover almost all software in distributions for the past several decades.
“AI” is a marketing term, in continuous use from the mid-twentieth century to encompass a broad and ever-changing range of automation and other tools, that is deliberately vague. If we want to be clear what the ban does and does not cover, we need to avoid that term.
And then of course we can deliberate on exactly what is permitted (code that was auto-corrected by a spell checker? code that had its boilerplate syntax automatically generated?) versus what is forbidden (code that was generated in some proprietary data centre? code that is an unattributable, non-consensual remix of existing code? code that was probabilistically extruded from an LLM?), because we’ll avoid the useless term “AI” and instead speak of specific tools and technologies.