As just about everyone who frequents this site very often knows, I have been writing a lot of tutorials and articles lately.
These are mostly basic commands for newbies and beginners, but sometimes a person who is familiar with the command
might learn a new flag or option they didn't know about before.
..anyway...
I was recently asked a few times, do I use use AI to create these articles? I answered no. But that's not toally accurate, I do use AI to check my spelling, layout the format of the content, and check my grammar ( i am notorious for leaving important words out of sentences ).
But I tell AI what I want to say, I give it the commands I want to use, the flags I want to use as examples, and the sample output generally comes my computers.
But then I got to thinking... how do I know what I know? If AI didn't tell me, how did I learn it?
I've been using Linux since 93/94, and UNIX/Solaris a few years before that. I had an Apple II and a Commodore 64 long before anyone
ever heard of Microsoft or Linux. When I first started using Linux, it wasn't ever really a distro per se. We downloaded packages emailed
developers, looked at man pages and help files. We read a LOT of README files and tried to figure out what they meant. There wasn't even really a standard of how these files should look yet. There was a lot of trial and error during these years, I didn't really know what I was doing to be honest and I blew a lot of things up, erased hard drives, removed network interfaces, deleted applications, etc... but hey, I learned a lot doing these things.
Then came the O'Reilly book phase. I still own over 30 over these even today. That's not counting the ones I have lost or given away. I actually met a couple of authors of some of these books and even worked with one of them. I asked him how he learned all the stuff he knew about that particular subject. It was lot like the way I learned. He called developers, he emailed them and asked questions. He read help files and man pages. He tried things and broke things. He said it took nearly 3 years to write his book.
Then came the yahoo and google phase. At first they weren't really very helpful, because nobody knew anything about Linux and GNU.
But after aperiod of a few years, communities started to develop. There were user groups and shared knowledge. Eventually sites like stackExchange, reddit, and linuxQuestions popped up. It was getting to the point that anybody could look up anything about anything.
About this time companies were hiring "professional" Linux admins. Looking back at those days, I'm not sure how professional I really was, but I thought I was. I thought I knew everything there was to know, but.... it turns out I didn't know a lot of things. I took courses and classes, I got Cisco certified, I got Redhat certified, I got my CompTIA+, I got my GCUX. These cost me a lot of money to take the courses, and a lot of money to take the tests to get certified. I invested thousands of dollars in learning what I know. (If I paid for it, do I own it?)
I still do a lot of these things even today. Which goes back to the question.. how does someone learn what they know?
I school I learned about english, math, geography and science from teachers, but where did they learn it from? College professors who learned it from someone else. I can tell you the way to get to my favorite restaurant from my house. I've fdriven there at least a hundred times. I drove there before google maps told me how to drive there. (So then, how I did I know how to get there?)
I how did learn how to drive a car, to ride a motorcycle, to go fishing? Someone taught me. But in the Linux world, I mostly taught myself. The problem is, now I have google maps to tell me stuff I already know, like how to get to my house.
Who owns that knowledge? Google or me? Back to the original question... how did I learn about Linux commands. As mentioned earlier, I read books,, and I used google. Have I ever used AI to learn something about Linux? The totally honest answer here is... I don't know. AI has been around a couple of years now. It's getting better. But let's say I did use AI to find out something about Linux, maybe the syntax of a command or something. Maybe I did this a year ago, or maybe six months ago. I honestly don't remember... honestly. I have looked a lot of stuff up over the years. But even if I did use AI, who owns that knowledge? AI or me?
I suppose it's one thing to say I going to write an article today and have AI create the whole thing from scratch about a subject I know nothing or very little about. In that case, I would say I learned it from AI. But if it's a command I've used a hundred times over the last 30 years, who do I give the credit to? O'Reilly, the developer? The man page? Google? StackExchane? or now a days... AI.
I know police officers and lawyers use phrases like artcle 459b of page 173, paragraph subsection D. I don't have that kind of memory, I don't know where I learned how to use sed to replace text, I do have an O'Reilly book about sed published in 1997. Chances are I learned from that book, but was it page 41 or page 57? Was it the first paragraph or the last sentence? Does O'Reilly own that knowledge or do I?
In the Music industry, there is something called the public domain. Songs like Happy Birthday, and Twinkle little star. Nobody owns the copyright to them anymore so anyone can use them free of charge. Linux/GNU is supposed to be FOSS ( FREE ) is it all already public domain knowledge? At some point do some Linux commands become such public knowledge that they are simply public domain?
But looking back at the articles I've written did I ever use AI to glean any knowledge about them? maybe, probably. But I honestly don't remember, so what do I do then, add a disclaimer at the bottom of every article that I may have learned some of this from AI?
This whole concept of being an information broker, especially in th age of AI will become a big issue soon if it already hasn't.
My other concern about all of this, seriously.. at the risk of this post becoming political, hear me out.
Here is an example, When you install Microsoft edge browser, even on Linux, the default home page is MSN news. You can hide it, but you can't change it. If MSN has particular agenda, you are forced to see that and hear that because you have to use their browser in order to use their AI. What happens when someone with a particular point of view "owns" all of the information we get to see? Maybe they aren't censoring the opposing view, but they make it harder to find, and don't show it to you by default. How does affect free-thinking? I don't care if you're for it or against it. The point is, you don't see the other side.
When you look at AI in this light, it gives a different perspective.
But I will watch myself from now on. If I use AI to gain knowledge about a particular Linux command, I will give credit to AI to teaching that to me. But in the meantime... who owns the knowledge of eveything we know right now?
We are the borg, prepare to be assimilated. We will tell you what you need to know, we will tell you what to think.
These are mostly basic commands for newbies and beginners, but sometimes a person who is familiar with the command
might learn a new flag or option they didn't know about before.
..anyway...
I was recently asked a few times, do I use use AI to create these articles? I answered no. But that's not toally accurate, I do use AI to check my spelling, layout the format of the content, and check my grammar ( i am notorious for leaving important words out of sentences ).
But I tell AI what I want to say, I give it the commands I want to use, the flags I want to use as examples, and the sample output generally comes my computers.
But then I got to thinking... how do I know what I know? If AI didn't tell me, how did I learn it?
I've been using Linux since 93/94, and UNIX/Solaris a few years before that. I had an Apple II and a Commodore 64 long before anyone
ever heard of Microsoft or Linux. When I first started using Linux, it wasn't ever really a distro per se. We downloaded packages emailed
developers, looked at man pages and help files. We read a LOT of README files and tried to figure out what they meant. There wasn't even really a standard of how these files should look yet. There was a lot of trial and error during these years, I didn't really know what I was doing to be honest and I blew a lot of things up, erased hard drives, removed network interfaces, deleted applications, etc... but hey, I learned a lot doing these things.
Then came the O'Reilly book phase. I still own over 30 over these even today. That's not counting the ones I have lost or given away. I actually met a couple of authors of some of these books and even worked with one of them. I asked him how he learned all the stuff he knew about that particular subject. It was lot like the way I learned. He called developers, he emailed them and asked questions. He read help files and man pages. He tried things and broke things. He said it took nearly 3 years to write his book.
Then came the yahoo and google phase. At first they weren't really very helpful, because nobody knew anything about Linux and GNU.
But after aperiod of a few years, communities started to develop. There were user groups and shared knowledge. Eventually sites like stackExchange, reddit, and linuxQuestions popped up. It was getting to the point that anybody could look up anything about anything.
About this time companies were hiring "professional" Linux admins. Looking back at those days, I'm not sure how professional I really was, but I thought I was. I thought I knew everything there was to know, but.... it turns out I didn't know a lot of things. I took courses and classes, I got Cisco certified, I got Redhat certified, I got my CompTIA+, I got my GCUX. These cost me a lot of money to take the courses, and a lot of money to take the tests to get certified. I invested thousands of dollars in learning what I know. (If I paid for it, do I own it?)
I still do a lot of these things even today. Which goes back to the question.. how does someone learn what they know?
I school I learned about english, math, geography and science from teachers, but where did they learn it from? College professors who learned it from someone else. I can tell you the way to get to my favorite restaurant from my house. I've fdriven there at least a hundred times. I drove there before google maps told me how to drive there. (So then, how I did I know how to get there?)
I how did learn how to drive a car, to ride a motorcycle, to go fishing? Someone taught me. But in the Linux world, I mostly taught myself. The problem is, now I have google maps to tell me stuff I already know, like how to get to my house.
Who owns that knowledge? Google or me? Back to the original question... how did I learn about Linux commands. As mentioned earlier, I read books,, and I used google. Have I ever used AI to learn something about Linux? The totally honest answer here is... I don't know. AI has been around a couple of years now. It's getting better. But let's say I did use AI to find out something about Linux, maybe the syntax of a command or something. Maybe I did this a year ago, or maybe six months ago. I honestly don't remember... honestly. I have looked a lot of stuff up over the years. But even if I did use AI, who owns that knowledge? AI or me?
I suppose it's one thing to say I going to write an article today and have AI create the whole thing from scratch about a subject I know nothing or very little about. In that case, I would say I learned it from AI. But if it's a command I've used a hundred times over the last 30 years, who do I give the credit to? O'Reilly, the developer? The man page? Google? StackExchane? or now a days... AI.
I know police officers and lawyers use phrases like artcle 459b of page 173, paragraph subsection D. I don't have that kind of memory, I don't know where I learned how to use sed to replace text, I do have an O'Reilly book about sed published in 1997. Chances are I learned from that book, but was it page 41 or page 57? Was it the first paragraph or the last sentence? Does O'Reilly own that knowledge or do I?
In the Music industry, there is something called the public domain. Songs like Happy Birthday, and Twinkle little star. Nobody owns the copyright to them anymore so anyone can use them free of charge. Linux/GNU is supposed to be FOSS ( FREE ) is it all already public domain knowledge? At some point do some Linux commands become such public knowledge that they are simply public domain?
But looking back at the articles I've written did I ever use AI to glean any knowledge about them? maybe, probably. But I honestly don't remember, so what do I do then, add a disclaimer at the bottom of every article that I may have learned some of this from AI?
This whole concept of being an information broker, especially in th age of AI will become a big issue soon if it already hasn't.
My other concern about all of this, seriously.. at the risk of this post becoming political, hear me out.
Here is an example, When you install Microsoft edge browser, even on Linux, the default home page is MSN news. You can hide it, but you can't change it. If MSN has particular agenda, you are forced to see that and hear that because you have to use their browser in order to use their AI. What happens when someone with a particular point of view "owns" all of the information we get to see? Maybe they aren't censoring the opposing view, but they make it harder to find, and don't show it to you by default. How does affect free-thinking? I don't care if you're for it or against it. The point is, you don't see the other side.
When you look at AI in this light, it gives a different perspective.
But I will watch myself from now on. If I use AI to gain knowledge about a particular Linux command, I will give credit to AI to teaching that to me. But in the meantime... who owns the knowledge of eveything we know right now?
We are the borg, prepare to be assimilated. We will tell you what you need to know, we will tell you what to think.
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and my naming). After that I was about to report it, but I thought, "heck, better check, been out of society during the 2022-23 AI frenzy" and there is a thread about it, which I can compress to a considerably shorter length: Linux.org has no specific rules, more guidelines, which are basically not to just copy+paste, but if you do then you should add to it, and don't use it to answer a question you can't answer. So rather than making our janatorial staff's lives more difficult, I let slerping dogs lie as the people using it have proved their competence to me in the past and mostly I don't blame them as some questions are either asked to death or an AI is more adept at phrasing the answer (scary times) in noob-friendly way. So I guess addressing the elephant, yep, I know, now y'all know I know. There is also an AI checking site, forget what it's called. Moving onto some other points...
