Linux

Great technology is invisible.

As long as AI is advertised as being a unique selling point, I'm not interested.

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.

Yes. There a problems with the Gnome desktop environment. Without looking at the issue tracker, I can assure you that AI is not the solution to any of them. Even if AI may be a possible solution to a problem, it would probably not be the best one.

You can't do machine learning without tons of data and processing power.

Commercial "AI" has been built on fucking over everything that moves, on both counts. They suck power at alarming rates, especially given the state of the climate, and they blatantly ignore copyright and privacy.

FOSS tends to be based on a philosophy that's strongly opposed to at least some of these methods. To start with, FOSS is build around respecting copyright and Microsoft is currently stealing GitHub code, anonymizing it, and offering it under their Copilot product, while explicitly promising companies who buy Copilot that they will insulate them from any legal downfall.

So yeah, some people in the "Linux space" are a bit annoyed about these things, to put it mildly.

Edit: but, to address your concerns, there's nothing to be gained by rushing head-first into new technology. FOSS stands to gain nothing from early adoption. FOSS is a cultural movement not a commercial entity. When and if the technology will be practical and widely available it will be incorporated into FOSS. If it won't be practical or will be proprietary, it won't. There's nothing personal about that.

AI is mostly just hype. It's the new blockchain

There are important AI technologies in the past for things like vision processing and the new generative AI has some uses like as a decent (although often inaccurate) summarizer/search engine. However, it's also nothing revolutionary.

It's just a neat peace of tech

But here come MS, Apple, other big companies, and tech bros to push AI hard, and it's so obv that it's all just a big scam to get more of your data and to lock down systems further or be the face of get-rich-quick schemes.

I mean the image you posted is a great example. Recall is a useless feature that also happens to store screenshots of everything you've been doing. You're delusional if you think MS is actually going to keep that totally local. Both MS and the US government are going to have your entire history of using the computer, and that doesn't sit right with FOSS people.

FOSS people tend to be rather technical than the average person, so they don't fall for tech enthusiast nonsense as much.

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.

A lot of mentions of AI from companies is absolute marketing bullshit. And if you can't see that you don't want to.

People who consciously use and support F/LOSS usually do it because they look at software with a very critical eye. They see the failures of proprietary software and choose to go the other way. That same critical view is why they are critical of most "AI" tools -- there have been numerous failures attributed to AI, and precious little value that isn't threatened by those failures.

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?

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS AI models so that we don’t become obsolete.

lol no thanks.

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.

[Sarcastic 'translation'] tl;dr: A lot of people who are relatively well-placed to understand how much technology is involved even in downvoting this post are downvoting this post because they're afraid of technology!

Just more fad-worshipping foolishness, drooling over a buzzword and upset that others call it what it is. I want it to be over but I'm sure whatever comes next will be just as infuriating. Oh no, now our cursors all have to change according to built-in (to the cursor, somehow, for some reason) software that tracks our sleep patterns! All of our cursors will be obsolete (?!??) unless they can scalably synergize with the business logic core to our something or other 😴

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

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS AI models so that we don't become obsolete.

I don't get it. How Linux destops would become obsolete if they don't have native AI toolsets on DEs? It's not like they have a 80% market share. People who run them as daily drivers are still niche, and most don't even know Linux exists. Most ppl grown up with Microsoft and Apple shoving ads down their throat, using them in schools first hand, and that's all they know and taught. If I need AI, I will find ways to intergrate to my workflow, not by the dev thinks I need it.

And if you really need something like MS's Recall, here is a FOSS version of it.

I'm not against AI. I'm against the hoards of privacy-disrespecting data collection, the fact that everybody is irresponsibility rushing to slap AI into everything even when it doesn't make sense because line go up, and the fact nobody is taking the limitations of things like Large Language Models seriously.

The current AI craze is like the NFTs craze in a lot of ways, but more useful and not going to just disappear. In a year or three the crazed C-level idiots chasing the next magic dragon will settle down, the technology will settle into the places where it's actually useful, and investors will stop throwing all the cash at any mention of AI with zero skepticism.

It's not Luddite to be skeptical of the hot new craze. It's prudent as long as you don't let yourself slip into regressive thinking.