Anti-AIPerson

Richard Stallman

Founder of the Free Software Movement

GNU founder and free-software patriarch who calls ChatGPT a “bullshit generator,” maintains a standing page of reasons not to use it, and whose FSF branded GitHub Copilot “unacceptable and unjust.”

Software Engineer Tech

Wikipedia Reasons not to use ChatGPT

In his words

I call it a “bullshit generator” because it generates output “with indifference to the truth”.

— Stallman.org, 2024

ChatGPT is not “intelligence”, so please don’t call it “AI”. I define “intelligence” as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence.

— Stallman.org, 2024

Biography

Richard Stallman (born 1953) is the founder of the free-software movement: he launched the GNU Project in 1983, founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, wrote GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and spent four decades arguing that software users deserve the freedom to run, study, modify, and share the programs they depend on. Modern AI, in his analysis, fails that test on every count.

Reasons not to use ChatGPT

Stallman maintains a permanent “Reasons not to use ChatGPT” page on his personal site, filed alongside his indictments of Apple, Google, and Uber. His objection is twofold. The first is epistemic: the system plays with words without knowing what they mean, so calling it intelligence spreads “misplaced trust” among millions. The second is the argument he has made since the 1980s — ChatGPT is unreleased, proprietary software that users can only reach through someone else’s server.

Doing your own computing via software running on someone else’s server inherently trashes your computing freedom.

— Stallman.org, 2024

The institution he founded fights on a parallel front: in July 2021 the Free Software Foundation declared GitHub Copilot “unacceptable and unjust” — it requires nonfree software and acts as a service-as-a-software-substitute — and funded a call for white papers on whether training on free code and emitting snippets from it violates the copyleft licenses Stallman invented. Stallman himself remains a polarizing figure; he resigned from the FSF board in 2019 over comments related to the Epstein scandal, and his 2021 reinstatement drew open letters both against and for him.