this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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We truly are witnessing the death of open source in real time. Thanks AI!
Let's not being over-drammic here. They just need a better way to filter off AI junk request. They should be the one to do it? No, it suck. Is it fair? Not at all. Still this is what things are now.
Btw. People using Linux should remember that just because " it's free" doesn't mean it don't cost money and resources to keep going. So:
DO YOUR PART AND DONATE TO YOUR DISTRO DEVELOPERS.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/donate
https://www.debian.org/donations
https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php
I read that Linux Foundation spend only 3% on the Linux kernel. Where the rest go? Well one of their biggest spending is AI.
The reports don't have to be irrelevant slop to be overwhelming.
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/26/linux-kernel-czar-says-ai-bug-reports-arent-slop-anymore/5226256
indeed! The open source community should adopt LLM powered mailing list filters. Basically new age version of "protection money" as you pay AI firms to stop other AI firms from drowning your organization.
Joking aside, the dead Internet theory is unfortunately looking pretty accurate.
Deep Seek and other locally hosted options should be up to this task...
To be fair, there's no difference between a ai junk report and a human junk report. Literally not a single difference.
The problem is ai junk reports are easier to make and thus there's more of them.
This EXACT same problem could have existed at any point in the past, and it's been a problem in the past to a lesser degree.
No one ever bothered to fix it cause it resolved it self by virtue of people being lazy. Now the barrier is low enough that the problem they should have fixed two+ decades ago is biting them in the fucking ass.
This isn't ai's fault. Its entirely on developers fault as a whole. No one has ever figured out a way to deal with massive amounts of spam reliably. Because the solution has ALWAYS been to just ignore it till it goes away.
So now the devs of basically every community not just the Linux world. Has to figure out how to fix a decades old problem because their only solution has stopped working.
So while I agree it's annoying that ai slop is being spammed to devs, and that the people doing it are fucking annoying twats. Its not their fault this is a problem. They are THE problem, they are not the cause or reason it IS a problem tho.
This is something I don't think people are internalizing about (agentic) AI. Its disruption doesn't stem from its "intelligence", but in its persistence. We are very rapidly approaching an era of infinite agency, but our entire society is designed around people having limited agency. Everything assumes that a vast majority of people won't bother to use their agency. Sending complaints to local government agencies, waiting in line for concert tickets, starting an online business, submitting pull requests, etc.; they all assume most people won't bother; they'll choose to use their limited agency on something else. Agentic AI will blow that all up; you'll be able to point the AI at a goal on your behalf and not think about it again.
AI slop will hypothetically vanish as AI improves, but that doesn't do anything to address the fact that we'll all have effectively infinite agency.
There's a sort of built-in compensation for "response rates" or "perception rates" - in my industry we trend customer complaints and act according to the data we receive, but we also know that for every complaint we receive there are typically 30 similar events that go unreported. We also know that certain "responders" are outliers and will report every single instance they experience (and sometimes embellish and create additional instances for dramatic effect) but these are exceedingly rare and usually "adjusted" to normal responder levels once identified.
Now, when people create AI agents to file the complaints for them... that's a new level of response rates. 25 years ago I came close to doing this for airport flyover noise complaints - our local (international) airport had an obscure portal for local residents to complain when they were bothered by jet flyovers - and our neighborhood would get dozens of events per month where the noise was so loud you couldn't hear the other side of a phone call INSIDE your house with the windows shut. Thousands of homes were impacted by this, often 4 or 5 times in a row within an hour or two. But, the complaint channel was so obscure and the reporting process inconvenient enough that very few complaints were recorded, and they loved to point out that 40% of their complaints came from a single resident. Smart phones weren't a widespread thing yet, if they were I would have "made an app for that" where anytime you were "impacted" by a jet flyover all you would have to do is pull out your phone and tap the app to file a report. (I considered developing it for Palm Pilot, but I doubt even 10 residents would have carried Palm Pilots for the purpose of filing reports...) If we got a couple hundred residents across the neighborhood reporting even 10% of the troublesome flyovers, we might have changed the conversation - as it was the airport used the lack of complaints to justify no change in flight patterns.
We had a good idea early on for email spam, but we didn't use it. There was a proposal for basically proof of work, sort of like what's used in cryptocurrency, as a requirement to accept an email. While the threshold to defeat a lot of spam was low enough to not bother the average individual sending mail, businesses hated it because it would make it more expensive to bulk mail their users. Every time I see the thousands of bullshit emails in my inbox, I'm reminded that we endure spam to protect that.
I'm reading this as: we endure spam to protect spam