1
One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?” LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, public bodies, law firms and thousands of other organisations – will not add a feature to its default configuration until that feature can be delivered under the conditions defined by the project in accordance with its principles. User-controlled execution. The user must be able to choose where inference takes place: on the local computer, on an infrastructure directly controlled by the user, or on a service chosen independently by the user. A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice. No content may leave the computer without authorisation. The content of documents is a user’s asset and, in many implementations, is also legally protected material: medical records, case files, tender documents and student data. Transmission must be the result of a user’s decision and not behaviour carried out in the background by the application. No telemetry of any kind. LibreOffice does not collect usage data, and this must also apply
It’s among the more annoying parts of the whole AI thing, amid an ocean of things too-concerning-to-be-annoying.
“AI” / llm’s, are not artificial intelligence in the way laypeople mean it, and in the sense that LLM’s are AI - we’ve had AI for decades. Occasionally I’ll be socializing with someone I consider very intellgenet (e.x. recently, a chemical engineer) who was telling me how they just learned AI’s ‘just predict the next word’, and it just bugs me so so much how little people understand these things.
Like, they are ruining our world. Climate, commerce, security - everything is going to get a LOT shittier. And you don’t understand at a basic level how it works. It’s just sad.