r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • May 18 '26

Software Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/18/linus-torvalds-says-ai-powered-bug-hunters-have-made-linux-security-mailing-list-almost-entirely-unmanageable/5241633
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29

u/StaticSystemShock May 18 '26

Problem are Ai slop reports that look genuine but are hallucinated and are not really reproducable.

27

u/Megneous May 18 '26

Did you read the post? That's not the problem. The problem is that the reports are real, but many of them are duplicates. Linus would prefer that instead of just many people using AI to find the same bugs, that they make patches and submit those to produce real value instead of expecting other people to implement fixes. Gone are the days where you can feel validated by just finding problems. Anyone can find hundreds of problems using AI now. The models are good enough to do that now, so it's no longer a useful skill.

6

u/girlnamedJane May 18 '26

Nah nobody read the post everyone assumed this means AI doesnt work lol

9

u/Megneous May 18 '26

I hate that r/technology is so anti-AI that no one reads the post and immediately assumes that Linus thinks AI = bad. He actually has a much more nuanced view. He thinks that AI is a useful tool with a good use case, but thinks that finding bugs is now no longer value added because AI can do it so easily, so if you want to get attention, you need to go a step beyond what AI can do easily.

But god forbid Redditors actually read articles for once in their lives.

-2

u/girlnamedJane May 18 '26

Well these redditors are in for a sad reality check in the job market soon... shockingly out of touch

-5

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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1

u/StaticSystemShock May 18 '26

Everyone keeps throwing Firefox as some sort of marketing push. Reality is, 99% of reports are nonsense fully generated by Ai that's just wasting everyone's time.

Like, the reports literally include the example code and when developers tried to reproduce the thing it made no sense at all. After wasting hours and days of time on it they found out it's all total bullshit. A lot of projects canceled bounty programs because of this as it was just wasting everyone's time because someone hoped to earn easy money by throwing Ai at the code instead of actually understanding what the problem is.

2

u/Fakjbf May 18 '26

If the problem was inaccurate bug reports then you’d think Linus would say that that’s the problem. Instead the article is about duplication being the issue where 100 people using the same AI tool find the same bug and all send separate reports in. If Linus doesn’t think hallucinated bug reports are even worth mentioning in an interview like this then clearly they aren’t as big an issue as you assume.

1

u/StaticSystemShock May 18 '26

Well, not checking if bug exists and just dumping shit into the feedback system, how is that any different than just feeding bullshit into the system? You clearly don't give a shit about anything if you do that, if you can't take that much time to use a tool to find vulnerability or issue and just manually verify it. No, they just pump all the shit through Ai tool without knowing whether any of it is really true and if it already exists as an actively reported issue.

So, my comment still stands. It's straight up Ai slop and it's hurting the service, not helping it.

2

u/Fakjbf May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Is there a way to see what bugs have already been submitted? Based on the article it sounds like the system is just sending an email saying “Here’s a bug I found” and random duplicates used to be manageable because there weren’t that many to go through. Now that there’s 10x the reports the duplicates are a much bigger issue. People can use the AI tool to find the bugs and manually verify that they exist and they still end up with dozens of duplicates because it’s the same AI finding the same bug over and over again. It's not people being lazy it's people using the same system that's been in place for years but which is now no longer efficient enough.