IT’s Mr Sweary Linus Torvalds has told AI bug-report tourists to stop clogging the Linux security list with duplicated machine-generated rubbish.
Torvalds announced another Linux release candidate on the kernel mailing list today. But the livelier bit was his swipe at “documentation updates” aimed at a fresh nuisance: AI-generated security reports arriving by the skip-load.
“The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.”
The new documentation says the security team has found “bugs discovered this way systematically surface simultaneously across multiple researchers, often on the same day.”
Torvalds said: “People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying ‘that was already fixed a week/month ago’ and pointing to the public discussion.
“Which is all entirely pointless churn, and we’re making it clear that AI-detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved — and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can’t even see each other’s reports,” He said.
Torvalds added: “AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work. Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience. The documentation may be a bit less blunt than I am, but that’s the core gist of it.”
The new documentation says: “It turns out that the majority of the bugs reported via the security team are just regular bugs that have been improperly qualified as security bugs due to a lack of awareness of the Linux kernel’s threat model.”
Torvalds said at the end of his post: “If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too.
“If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on top of what the AI did. Don’t be the drive-by ‘send a random report with no real understanding’ kind of person. Ok?” he said.