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A Florida police department claims that scammers used AI to clone a sheriff’s voice, with scammers increasingly using voice clones that trick people into thinking they’ve missed jury duty or have a warrant out for their arrest are increasing.
According to Florida news outlet News6, scammers cloned Osceola County Sheriff Steve Moser’s voice and left a voicemail with a resident.
“They cloned his voice and was using Steve’s picture as well to say it was him making the phone call, and it was not,” Sheriff Chris Blackmon told News6.
💡
Have you been the target of deepfake video or AI voice cloning scams? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.
Impersonating a police officer is a third-degree felony in Florida. The Osceola County sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This particular scam cloning cops is spreading across several states, with reports of jury duty and arrest warrant scams targeting people in Georgia and Pennsylvania in the last week. These other reports don’t mention AI voice cloning explicitly, but note that the scammers sometimes have similar voices and tones as local police officers.
Voice cloning scams have been around for years, with scammers using commercially available AI voice impersonation tools to target the elderly, families, and businesses. Last year, 404 Media investigated real-time deepfake scams that incorporated voice and video to defraud people. In 2024, we reported on the ways scammers cloned celebrity voices and use AI videos in YouTube ads to scam people.
Scammers often impersonate company executives or leadership to trick employees into sending money, and voice cloning appears to be an increasing part of that. In February, scammers cloned a managing partner of a law firm with AI. Ultimately, a private bank ended up transferring $108 million.
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
The hot news in AI training is a development in a case from before chatbots as we know them — Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence from 2020. Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw, which publishes legal opinions with summaries. The summaries are copyrighted.
Ross was training a machine learning model on the Westlaw summary text. Thomson Reuters sued in 2020 and won in 2025.
The bankrupt shell of Ross Intelligence appealed to the Third Circuit — who rejected the appeal on 29 September. [Courthouse News]
The generative AI industry has been relying on the 2025 ruling in the Anthropic books case that training a chatbot was fair use if you’d bought the books. They’re wondering if the new Ross ruling could put that into question. The judges here held that Anthropic does not apply in the Ross case.
This Ross ruling shouldn’t be huge news — the original verdict against them came before the Anthropic ruling — but it’s been a bit of a shock to an AI industry that thought they were in the clear.
Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves wrote: [opinion, PDF, archive]
Under ROSS’s framing, this case appears to concern the future of AI legal technology. But appearances can be deceiving.
… The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose. We therefore hold that Thomson Reuters’s materials are copyrightable and that ROSS’s use was not fair.
Fair use rulings are very dependent on the particular facts and circumstances, so this new ruling doesn’t promptly blow up the Anthropic ruling. But it does raise all sorts of exciting legal questions!
Fair use in the US has various factors in law. How these apply is different in every case. Feeding the Common Crawl of the whole Internet into your research model is different to feeding it to Claude, and that’s different to feeding Westlaw into Ross Intelligence’s machine learning model.
Ross Intelligence plans to take this appeal to the Supreme Court. I have no idea how the Supreme Court would rule on it, or if they’d even hear the case. If they did, I’d expect amicus briefs from every AI company about how they should let Ross Intelligence off.
If the Supreme Court did let Ross off, what would happen next? Anthropic still have that previous ruling. But someone bringing a new case against Anthropic could use a (hypothetical) ruling in Ross’s favour.
If that happened, we might end up with the AI vendors finally being forced to pay licenses for everything. Like Anthropic wasn’t in enough financial deep water.
But this is all speculative right now. You probably can’t use this Ross appeal rejection as a fresh bludgeon for Anthropic. Yet.
Probably nothing much will happen. But it’ll definitely be fun!
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Today's links
- Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware": And they used Google, Facebook and every other major ad platform to do it.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Big Mouth Billy Bass x Linux; No-Fly lists v common sense; Lemony Snicket advises the 1%; "Aloha From Hell"; KSR v Elon Musk; "Everything Belongs to the Future"; Trump's mail-servers run Win2003; Copyfraud v covid.
- Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware" (permalink)
More than half of all internet users have installed an ad-blocker; Doc Searls calls it the largest consumer boycott in history. As large as that boycott is, everyone – yes, everyone – should block every "programmatic" ad, because the entire system is so insecure that failing to do so could result in the total compromise of any or all of your digital devices.
That's the inescapable conclusion of Citizen Lab's latest blockbuster investigative report, "Exposing AdFection," which reveals how the largest ad-tech companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, allowed themselves to be hijacked by a "mercenary spyware" company that used the ad system to locate targeted individuals and serve "zero-click malware" that took over their computers and phones without them having to take any action:
https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/
These tech giants amassed detailed surveillance dossiers on virtually every internet user, and they've assigned each of us unique, persistent identifiers, like a Social Security Number for spying. These companies also allow advertisers – or anyone pretending to be an advertiser – to serve blobs of code (which is all an ad is) to anyone based on those identifiers.
This allowed an Israeli spyware company called Discover-Tech (which masquerades as an ad-tech company) to sell totalitarian governments and sleazy corporate mercenaries the ability to pluck individual internet users out of the billions who log in every day and then serve "malicious ads" (that is, blobs of arbitrary code) to those targeted users. These malicious ads contained "no-click, zero-day" attacks, which meant that they exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities to take over devices without any user interaction. The mere act of loading a web-page or opening an app that relied on one of these gigantic ad-tech companies to serve ads was enough to compromise your device. No clicks needed, and no warning.
Among the targets of this attack campaign were the computers of workers at Al Jazeera. They were attacked with malware from the mercenary spyware company Candiru (which now calls itself "Integrity Labs" because irony is not dead). Beyond Candiru, Discover-Tech also facilitates attacks by numerous criminal mercenary spyware companies, serving ads on hundreds of thousands of sites and apps.
Discover-Tech was "certified" as a safe supplier by Google, Yandex, Microsoft, Beeswax (a division of Comcast) and IAB, the ad-tech industry's leading professional association. Ironically, Discover-Tech even attacked users by serving them malicious GDPR notices that appeared to let users opt out of commercial surveillance.
Because Discover-Tech was certified by all these industry bodies and firms, it had access to more than four billion ad-auctions, meaning that on billions of occasions, it was able to collect the identities of users loading apps and visiting websites, check them against the list of targets, and attack any victims it discovered through this dragnet.
Discover-Tech is an Israeli company with ties to other Israeli spyware and hacking companies, including through its board, whose members included Eric Banoun ("One of the pioneers of offensive cyber in Israel" –Haaretz). They have overlaps, relationships and affiliations with a rogue's gallery of Israeli companies, including the notorious NSO Group, who routinely sell cyber-weapons to the world's worst governments and whose products have been used to attack journalists, embassy workers, and activists.
The whole incident highlights the monumental insecurity of the ad-tech industry, whose indiscriminate and voracious surveillance and manifestly insufficient vetting and security auditing now expose every internet user in the world to terrifying targeted attacks. These companies – including Google, a thrice-convicted monopolist whose surveillance tendrils are wrapped around the whole world – claim that they operate their networks with prudence and oversight. But the proof is in the pudding: for years, they've played host to a murderer's row of cyber-mercenaries who used their infrastructure to attack journalists and others.
The only way to avoid this is to block ads. This is easy enough to do in a browser (which is why the majority of internet users have installed an ad-blocker in their browsers), but it's illegal to reverse-engineer and modify an app so you can block the ads in it:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element
Many websites run anti-ad-block scripts that push out nagging, guilt-tripping notices that call you a thief and a cheapskate for blocking ads. Ignore those notices: if a website is running "programmatic" ads that allow arbitrary third parties to spy on billions of people and target individuals for malicious device takeovers, they are charging too high a price to see their content.
Some sites go further: their notices demand that you either turn off your ad-blocker or pay for a subscription. This "pay or okay" scheme is illegal in Europe, California and other territories with strong privacy laws, and they are morally bankrupt besides. Privacy shouldn't be a luxury item and everyone deserves to be secure from cyber-attacks:
https://noyb.eu/en/noybs-pay-or-okay-report-how-companies-make-you-pay-privacy
This report also provides the most comprehensive rebuttal to a dangerous idea that refuses to die: that we should improve competition in the ad-tech sector by assigning every internet user a mandatory, government-issued advertising ID to "democratize" ad-targeting and followup (which the sector calls "attribution"):
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
Despite all this, none of it is an indictment of ads per se. The problem here isn't advertising, it's surveillance. The ad-tech sector has convinced advertisers that targeting ads to users rather than content will massively improve ad performance. The evidence for this is very poor: targeted ads improve clickthrough rates by less than 5% (relative to content-based ads that relate to the substance of the page you're looking at), and they're incredibly expensive (and very dangerous!) to serve.
On top of all that, surveillance-based ads shift power away from publishers (who know more about the materials they publish than any ad-tech company ever will) to spying ad-tech companies (who can spy on users in ways that no publisher could ever match). Whatever minor additional revenues surveillance advertising can wring out of the market are totally swamped by the cost of the ad-tech sector's own operations, which the ad-tech sector makes up for by grossly underinvesting in security and by colluding to cheat publishers and advertisers, charging more for ads and paying less to the websites that run them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
If we want to improve competition in advertising services, the answer isn't to facilitate spying (which also allows the world's scummiest cyber-mercenaries to stage and serve targeted attacks). We should ban surveillance advertising altogether, restoring context-based ads to their role as the way that publishers make an honest living without selling out their audiences:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/#class-formation
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Philips updates instructions for ultrasound system linked to 4 deaths https://www.medtechdive.com/news/philips-updates-instructions-for-ultrasound-system-linked-to-4-deaths/832692/
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Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/02/1145639/dont-be-fooled-llms-dont-reason/
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Beneath resilient financial markets, risks remain elevated and vulnerabilities persist https://www.imf.org/en/publications/gfsr/issues/2026/10/13/global-financial-stability-report-october-2026
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Ultimate gridfinity drawer configurator https://makerworld.com/en/models/2737065-ultimate-gridfinity-drawer-configurator
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Is Blockbuster Video the Answer to Our Digital Privacy Woes? https://www.thenation.com/article/society/digital-privacy-salazar-paramount/
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Trump Is Encouraging Airlines to Scam Passengers in Every Way Possible https://newrepublic.com/article/216435/trump-airline-fees-fines-passenger-rights-scam
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Linux on a Big Mouth Billy Bass https://web.archive.org/web/20010927153043/http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/
#20yrsago No-Fly lists even stupider than suspected https://web.archive.org/web/20061019002553/http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fstories%2F2006%2F10%2F05%2F60minutes%2Fmain2066624.shtml
#20yrsago Canadian MP booted for his blog https://web.archive.org/web/20061026153747/http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/10/18/turner-caucus.html
#20yrsago Recording industry shuts out Brazilian legal scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20061103225020/http://www.a2kbrasil.org.br/ENG/SIGN-A-PETITION-FOR-AMENDING-THE
#20yrsago How pickpockets work https://web.archive.org/web/20070110023812/http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/2006/11/mystory.html
#15yrsago Why are more people opting for legal name-changes than ever before? https://web.archive.org/web/20111020163908/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15333140
#15yrsago Advice to the 1% from Lemony Snicket https://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket/
#15yrsago Proposed Australian law makes it an offense to insult Gaming Minister Michael O’Brien https://web.archive.org/web/20120507161803/http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/surely-this-is-a-joke/story-fn7x8me2-1226167552466
#15yrsago Aloha From Hell: Sandman Slim goes back to Hell and kicks more ass https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/18/aloha-from-hell-sandman-slim-goes-back-to-hell-and-kicks-more-ass/
#10yrsago California DMV thinks “INFOS3C” is a dirty word https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/17/california-dmv-rejects-1nfos3c-vanity-plate-because-sexual-connotation/
#10yrsago Howard Stern won’t release Trump tapes https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/howard-stern-on-replaying-his-donald-trump-interviews-it-would-be-a-betrayal-7542079/
#10yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson says Elon Musk’s Mars plan is a “1920s science-fiction cliché” https://web.archive.org/web/20161018043554/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/why-elon-musk-s-mars-vision-needs-some-real-imagination
#10yrsago UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal says GHCQ illegally spied for 17 years https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13305270/uk-illegal-surveillance-gchq-investigatory-powers-tribunal
#10yrsago Project Include cuts off Y Combinator because Peter Thiel is a part-time investor there https://web.archive.org/web/20161019043240/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/horrified-by-trump-silicon-valley-leaders-debate-cutting-ties-to-peter-thiel
#10yrsago Islamophobic terrorist cell planned a “bloodbath” in Kansas, wanted to kill Muslim babies https://web.archive.org/web/20161018144035/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/15/it-will-be-a-bloodbath-inside-the-kansas-militia-plot-to-ignite-a-religious-war/?utm_term=.a9d769256cf6
#10yrsago Everything Belongs to the Future: a tale of pharmadystopian, immortal gerontocrats https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/18/everything-belongs-to-the-future-a-tale-of-pharmadystopian-immortal-gerontocrats/
#10yrsago UK government proposes issuing Britons with unique porn-viewing ID numbers https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/a-database-of-the-uks-porn-habits-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/
#10yrsago Donald Trump’s mail-servers are running Windows 2003 https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#core
#5yrsago Copyfraudster censors investigation of implausible covid gadget https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#copyfraud
#5yrsago Corporatism made John Deere ripe for a strike https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#deere-dash
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 -
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 -
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 -
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai -
Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/ -
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/ -
Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ -
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ -
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html -
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation -
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ -
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ -
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Life After AI (Brain Bar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI -
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 -
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ -
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ -
How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc
Latest books (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ -
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 563 (26602 total).
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"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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ISSN: 3066-764X
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Your friend and mine, Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, is going even harder into the AI slop. He tweeted: [Twitter, archive]
We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration.
MAXIMUM AI ACCELERATION!!
Epic was working on a first-person shooter game using Disney characters. This was slated for March. It’s now been delayed indefinitely — and the developers have been directed to finish the project with AI: [Bloomberg, archive]
Developers on the game, a shooter featuring characters from the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, were instructed to implement an “AI first” production model using tools such as Anthropic’s Claude. Humans will then manage and guide that work. “No more hand-written code,” one of the game’s directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows.”
… “We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” said Jake Jones, communications director at Epic Games, in a statement to Bloomberg News. A spokesperson for Disney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
How good will this new shooter be? We have a taste of Epic’s vibe genius with their new game launcher: [blog post]
Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.
Epic even added an infographic of how fast the vibe launcher is. Faster than Steam!
(The same day, Valve released a Steam update that was even faster. Oh well.) [Twitter, video]
Martin Keely from Epic told the Verge: [Verge]
The launcher is something that is demonstrative of the speed and efficiency both from the development process and the actual output that we think gives us confidence that the direction that we’re headed in is a positive one for our company and for gaming development overall.
Epic is putting the new launcher forward as “demonstrative.” In testing, the launcher leaves trails of glitches, artifacts, and transparency errors.
The errors look very like a bad video driver setup — but there are multiple videos of this thing failing just this way for different people. [Mastodon; Reddit, video]
Epic considered this release quality. If you ever feel like a bad programmer, this will lift your mood.
Epic is also trying to bring its Easy Anti-Cheat root kit to Linux, so it can sell you Fortnite. They already have a userspace version, but this is a kernel version. This will involve: [blog post]
signed kernel, signed kernel modules, and secure boot with attestation.
That is, it’s a vibe-coded root kit. They also want to get Linux distributions to agree this is a good idea. Good luck with that.
This new phase in Epic’s existence will be incredible! As in, not credible.
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Linux is the name of a computer operating system kernel and a group of systems built on it, like Ubuntu or Mint.
Linux is the basic infrastructure of the Internet. It’s important.
A report just in from the Kernel Maintainers Summit on 8 October reveals just how full AI slop the Linux kernel project has gone. And so has project leader Linus Torvalds. [LWN]
Torvalds expects contributors to use well-funded chatbot coding:
Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world.
The project has also stopped marking chatbot commits to the kernel code.
Kernel maintainers are complaining they’re drowning in slop. Torvalds’ answer is: less people, more chatbots!
Torvalds said he is not trying to push non-chatbot users out of the project. But there’s already so much slop code and so many slop procedures that his actions don’t match these words.
If you are trying to get off Windows onto a system that works better and faster, a version of Linux is still your least bad choice. Microsoft itself admits Linux is faster on games than Windows 11. [WIndows Central]
But Linux going hard slop is bad news. How did we get here?
Linus Torvalds has been AI curious for a while. He went on Linus Sebastian’s YouTube channel, Linus Tech Tips, in November last year. He was clearly well into the chatbot already: [YouTube]
That’s reality. Deal with it. That genie is out of the bottle. You’re not getting it back. And you’re not getting it back whether you are a photographer who’s out of work. Those things are gone, right? Because you can fake pictures so much better now. Or you’re a programmer that has to learn to deal with a new reality.
I think actually on the programming side, we’re in a fairly good spot. I really think that AI will be a tool and it will make people more productive. I think that vibe coding is great for getting into programming. I think it’s going to be a horrible thing to maintain.
Torvalds’s first publicly released chatbot code was in January this year, when he vibe-coded a project in Python because he didn’t know enough Python. The programming language kids learn in high school. The guy who runs the kernel couldn’t get his head around Python. [GitHub]
Kernel developers were trying to get chatbot code into the project for a while. Eventually the maintainers decided in April this year that they’d let it in if you labeled it with “Assisted-By.” [ZDNet]
In July, Google engineers added an AI review bot called Sashiko. The bot would review contributors’ code patches and make comments. Contributors were expected to address the bot’s comments — whether they made sense or not — or the kernel maintainers would often just ignore their patch.
This caused conflicts, which Torvalds firmly resolved in August: [lore.kernel.org]
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
… The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.
… This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.
“Social warrior” there is a version of the phrase “social justice warrior”, which is mainly used as a far-right dog-whistle. It was the one they used before “woke” or “DEI.” There is no way Torvalds doesn’t know what he was saying there.
He’s also rewriting history. Linux launched and attracted its initial developers as a social movement. People worked hard to get a system with actual principles that wasn’t about screwing its users over. There were movies about this! Torvalds spoke in them! Claiming Linux was always pure technology with no social element is simply false.
So the slop-gates were open. What sort of technical excellence did the antisocial warriors contribute? There’s this one from five days after Torvalds’ announcement. The message laments that the networking maintainers are drowning in slop — so they fixed this with more slop: [lore.kernel.org]
We are completely overwhelmed, of course. The glimmer of hope is that we secured sufficient LLM budget and access (thank you Meta!) to run reviews with multiple frontier models on each patch. This eliminates some hallucinations.
Thank you Meta! The message also suggests letting the chatbot commit code:
start shifting focus to letting the LLMs take care of the busy work — managing patchwork, automating common process complaints, editing commit messages, and maybe applying patches which already got ‘reviewed-by’ tags from people we trust.
Linux is not a social warrior project, it’s a Meta project! When your networking fails, remember to say: Thank you Meta!
How much slop is in Linux now? The maintainer summit has decided you don’t need to know that. They’ve just removed requiring the “Assisted-By” tag. [lore.kernel.org]
The “assisted-by” requirement was removed because contributors were ignoring it — and maintainers weren’t bothering to require it. Torvalds suggested the reason was:
many submitters were simply ashamed to admit that they were using those tools.
Imagine if there was something shameful about slop.
The Linux kernel slop flood is causing the sort of problems that a flood of slop code and slop practices always causes. Torvalds’ answer is more slop:
Linus Torvalds believes that blaming LLMs for the kernel community’s problems is wrong, when the problem is LLM users who do not understand how to use them or how the kernel works. A properly trained LLM is a useful tool, but it takes a lot of time to reach that point.
… If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately.
The chatbot works great if you set it up right, you must be prompting it wrong! So Linus, can you share your setup? No you can’t? That’s great, Linus.
So how do we encourage new contributors to join the kernel with these requirements? That’s the neat part — you don’t!
Torvalds added that he does not want to scare off people who want to write code; his message is that you have to either put in the effort to learn, or put a lot of money into an LLM to participate.
… Torvalds and others repeatedly said low-quality contributions from new developers should receive low priority, and that the community should stop trying to make contribution easy.
It’s already hard to contribute to Linux if you’re not working for a corporation. Now that’s explicit.
The end game for this is that the Linux kernel functionally becomes a closed shop. They don’t need new developers, new people all suck! Historically, this works for five to ten years, then the old developers start retiring or dying.
It’s hard to know what to do in the meantime. If you just want off Windows, then Linux is still less bad and isn’t advertising at you in the start menu.
Forking Linux is not easy. It’s not just copying the code, it’s building institutions to keep it maintained. Anyone who says “just fork it” is talking in bad faith.
Myself, I use Debian Linux. It’s the system I make the Pivot to AI podcast on every day. Debian is also letting the slop in. So I’m running the older Debian Trixie, which is supported until 2028. I’ll be seeing what the landscape’s like then. [Debian]
If you want a system that works like Linux, a lot of the Mastodon nerds are trying NetBSD, which is a mature and robust project which loathes AI slop. You do basically have to be a nerd. NetBSD does not support nearly as much hardware as Linux. Running your games in Wine is hit and miss. The Nvidia drivers are bad. It’s a bit like Linux was in 2000 or so. [NetBSD]
I suggest the social action: shame. Shame these people. Their actions are shameful. AI bros hate being shamed and they try to make rules against shaming — because shame works.
None of these people doing shameful things deserve a place in polite company. They should be shamed for their shameful choices.
The AI industry is also running a PR push to redefine common word usage. The word “slop” is also super effective — so the bros really hate “slop” and try to define it to mean slop they don’t like.
But all AI output is slop. It’s social spam. That’s what it’s for. It’s slop! Say “slop” every time.
The Linux AI slop brain rot will collapse with the AI bubble. You see these bozos comment on Linux Weekly News with dumb AI promotional tropes like “AI is here to stay” as if the bubble will go on forever.
But the crash is foreordained by the finances. Linux nerds, go read the finance press for once. Even if AI was everything they say it is — and it isn’t — the investor money is running out, and you can’t service hundreds of billions of dollars in debt with five billion in audited revenue.
The cheap chatbots are going away and the vendors will stop releasing open-weight local models as loss leaders. Can the Linux Foundation afford to run local models for its developers, models that are no longer trained and are aging out of usefulness, at ten or more times the cost? Good luck to them.
The guys who did all this will try to say “never mind.” But you already know their judgement is fatally defective. They worked for a world where the rest of us are devalued and discarded. They will still warrant shame. They need not to be trusted again.
As Linus Torvalds didn’t quite say in 2003: [NYT, archive]
Really, I’m not out to suck as much ass as Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
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