Richard Stallman: "Chatbots are Bullshit Generators"
The founder of the Free Software Foundation also stops in Munich on his European tour. There, he calls for greater use of open source – especially by the state.
Richard Stallman in Munich: Due to a cancer illness, the FSF founder wears a virus protection mask in public.
(Image: Monika Ermert)
During a presentation at the TU Munich, Richard Stallman advocates not sacrificing free choices on the altar of possible digital conveniences. In front of around 400 spectators, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) calls on students to only use and develop free software.
States could not afford to cede their sovereignty to large corporations, Stallman emphasizes to a full lecture hall. “We should fight this. We should ensure that our state institutions remain sovereign.” The city of Munich is not living up to its responsibility for the independence of administration with its departure from free LiMux.
The 72-year-old, who paved the way for GNU/Linux with the free text editor GNU Emacs and the licensing models essential for the “four freedoms” of programming, is currently touring Europe. In Munich, he appeared at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Technical University, where a lot of free software is developed for internal use, but proprietary programs like Microsoft 365 are also further promoted.
Uncompromising, please!
“Perhaps your university will ask you to use non-free software. Refuse it,” Stallman demanded in his characteristic radical manner. Where proprietary software is necessary for exams, universities should be challenged to offer their systems.
For proprietary conference systems, one should strive for proxying or gateway solutions. “Find someone who brings you into the conference via their connection,” says Stallman.
“Non-free software creates monopolies and ensures that millions of users cannot benefit from competition,” warns Stallman. The Free Software Foundation, which upholds freedom for the user – the ordinary user and the developer –, is capitalist in the best sense: “You will find Soviet-style socialism in the big tech companies.”
Libre Phone, Libre LLM?
Stallman is cautiously optimistic about free alternatives for mobile operating systems or large language models (LLMs), for example. However, the recently announced Libre Phone project is intended to build on the code base of “partially free” Android derivatives, just like its predecessor, Replicant. “We hope to help Replicant fly with Libre Phone,” says Stallman.
Stallman denounces Google's announced mandatory identification for app developers as a death sentence for free apps in the app store alternative F-Droid. Apparently, Stallman does not trust Google's assurances that sideloading for apps will remain.
The FSF community also wants to develop criteria for free alternatives in Artificial Intelligence (AI). They are close to a release, Stallman announces. At the same time, he appeals to the Munich audience to clearly differentiate between machine learning and chatbots.
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Bullshit Generators
Programs based on machine learning can be intelligent, within a limited scope, and perform certain tasks as well as humans. Chatbots, on the other hand, are merely “bullshit generators” that artificially produce “utterances devoid of any respect for the truth.”
The FSF founder was repeatedly asked about Munich's return to Microsoft's embrace. Stallman speculated that the city had been corrupted by Microsoft's promises to locate its development center in the city. In the long term, this is not sustainable due to the dependencies that arise, the developer believes.
Stallman notes a negative trend regarding the idea of also creating designs for free hardware. Own designs for free CPU boards are quite feasible, but self-designed, free chips are far too expensive. This leaves chips as a proprietary barrier: “We can't even write a free compiler for Nvidia GPUs because we don't know their instruction set.”
Here you can find a recording of the lecture at TU Munich.
(mma)
