Who?
come to devuan
The without disclosure part tells everything you need to know here. If it’s such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that? In an open source Community shouldn’t everything like that be known?
I wonder what’s the reason to make it optional? I think I’ve seen this approach with other projects as well. Isn’t transparency and accountability a good thing? Also, this kind of information helps immensely when reading pull requests or silly bug reports. And Debian acknowledge there might be licensing issues. So it might become some sort of liability to them once it taints everything and we can’t even tell?! So why? What’s the upside? Adorn oneself with borrowed plumes and not being forced to disclose the fact? Or too much bookkeeping?
I think it’s just the simple fact that there’s no way to enforce it
There are ways to enforce it. Yeah, you won’t be able to make everyone follow the rule, but it’s the same with any law and any public policy and they’re still valuable. You don’t make campaigns against DUI because you expect everyone to stop doing it, as that’s a nirvana fallacy, you make them because you expect them to reduce DUI.
Which tells a lot about how good they are. Slop is slop because it’s bad, but a high quality PR isn’t
With systems starting to move to watermarking tech a lot of them will actually be detectable.
Either way that doesn’t make it a bad idea or less useful.
Because the idea is to judge the code by its quality, not by who or what wrote it.
I think that’s a commendable effort. Usually I do it the same way. Just feels massively unfair to me towards human contributors. I’ve seen the AI pull requests and bugreports come in. And it’s very time consuming to deal with them. They’re long, convoluted, touch a lot of code… There’s frequently a good amount of “hallucinations” in them, because they’re sent in autonomously or by people who don’t know what they’re doing. There might be dozens of them in quick succession as with the larger projects. They eat up time and effort which is now missing to deal with human contributions or wishes. My own opinion is: Transparency would help a lot to prioritize stuff. I mean AI isn’t sentient, and as long as that holds true, I’d rather treat people with respect and the amount of attention they deserve… (In contrast to a level playing field between human and machine… Because the machines will easily beat us by sheer volume.)
True, but I think the kind of people who send those monster PRs either already have AIs cosign it or they aren’t reading the policy anyway. There have also been a number of studies that show LLMs usually ignore this kind of instruction.
Hmmh. Sure. People also deliberately instruct their agents not to reveal the fact. I can empathize with that, because there’s all these people out there yelling at you, and launching shit storms.
I believe the uptake in “co-authored by …” is due to some companies making it the default setting in their frameworks. It’s to some degree Microsoft being nice to us, not necessarily benevolence of the people sending in those PRs. Doesn’t really matter to me though. It’s enough to make me happy if that’s attached to some commit or PR. I don’t care how it got there, as long as it fits the purpose.
Edit: And thanks for your comment. I don’t think I agree. Nonetheless this might be the answer to my question.
There are so many levels of LLM involvement and once you make this distinction you actually have to devote some of your limited resources to define and enforce it. So I think it might not be strictly beneficial, but possibly also have downsides.
Where would you draw the line at which point it counts as LLM involvement? Having one run as some sort of spell/syntax checker? Doing some research (and being influenced by it) before hand coding something? Having it create a working prototype and then reimplementing it by hand? If you use code from somewhere else to solve a problem and ai use has not been disclosed for this code, do you automatically have to assume LLM usage was involved or is there plausible deniability?
I think in the end you’d have to use too many resources check it and debate where the line is drawn, when the real question is how you retain human knowledge and engagement within your community.
Just disclose how you used it.
“Just” like with GDPR, “just” follow the rules for personal data management. In reality, compliance stuff like that is expensive to implement.
So if you are going to require it, don’t pretend it is without cost. Which is exactly what you seem to be doing.
Conversely… if it’s so benign, why should it have a label?
Not really worth discussing - it’s not benign, and it can be made purposefully not benign by a third party without notification or knowledge. A third party who has already demonstrated a penchant for world domination, both technologically and physically.
Code in general is proven not to be benign
Excuse you my code doesn’t even compile properly, so it can not be malign by definition.
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
I mean, I would think, at least. It seems to me that most of the people in charge of big projects are usually FOSS purists.
That’s part of the reason why AI scrapers are breaking the small web. FOSS purists really have no significant defense against it aside from Anubis.
Real DoS protection comes from capacity, which costs serious dollars, especially in this day and age where botfarms can be hired by the hour for rather cheap and record-breaking attacks seem to happen like monthly.
The alternative is using a CDN, but there are none that align with FOSS ideals. And for CDNs to be really effective, you need them to break open TLS and handle the decrypted traffic, which raises privacy concerns on top.
But anyways…most license agreements would make it a requirement that if you’re using an open-source model, that it be properly attributed, right?
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
Most developers who use these tools (even FLOSS developers) appear to be using the corporate owned models that were definitely trained on both proprietary source code and code that is incompatible with the GPL license. Some EU courts have also already judged that LLM code cannot be copyrighted, which also means it cannot be licensed as GPL.
Currently, all code generated with an LLM has a 3 to 10% chance of unknowingly plagiarizing the copyrighted code it was trained on, and any FLOSS project that uses it is making a huge gamble that their codebase won’t be scanned by corporations in the future looking for violations to sue about, shut down rival FLOSS projects, etc.
It would be Useful for doing a retrospective on whether AI is helpful or not
Eye contact is benign for most of us. We still give it a context warning in civilized circles. It costs us almost nothing, and lets people make an informed decision what you engage with.
We saw this play out with GMO foods:
If it’s such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that?
later:
It’s specifically labelled, therefore it must be bad right? If we didn’t need to worry about it, it wouldn’t be labelled.
In the us anyway the food is labeled as bio-engineered, and everyone still buys it
It’s a good question for the people using it but the point is that you can really verify if someone is using it or not
Respect to Antoine. Having principles that are worth a damn is a rare trait amongst developers these days.
The world needs more people that act on principles and take a stance.
Weird that he didn’t care when Linus Torvalds adopted basically the same policy to the kernel that serves as the foundation of the main Debian distribution. I have an inkling that there is more going on at Debian, not LLM use alone.
didn’t he? have you checked?
the main thing is that it’s an upstream problem. the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles. if you want to stay on that kernel you have to take what you are given. in your own organisation you can at least try to change things.
Nuclear missiles probably run vxworks or another rtos, not linux
FOSS nukes when?
the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles
source:
Idk anything about this…but here is my Google results
Don’t think golden dome is actually implemented, though just some trump delusion…but apparently this Redhawk Linux is used in…
This is an educated guess but I think the entire US nuclear arsenal is so old that it predates Linux entirely.
I don’t think so. I got no sources or anything, but I think most nuclear missile silos and their software predate the linux kernel. And since we don’t really build nuclear weapons anymore but stick with the ones we already have, I don’t think that the linux kernel is really used in these kinds of sites.
However, that’s me guessing - wouldn’t say that I’m even 50% confident.
If he resigned only now, he didn’t resign before. What is there to check? That is common sense. Linus allowed LLM use and he was fine with Debian building on it. After all, all LLM use is literal fascism in his eyes.
He didn’t have the same reaction at that specific point of time. That does not mean he was fine with it, but even if it was, maybe people change? Insane conclusion, I know. Stop with the black and white thinking.
if he commented on it, for one.
He didn’t leave the Linux-based OS for Linus Torvalds himself stating a similar policy for the Linux kernel before Debian did.
Debian has a history of maintaining ancient kernels. But it’s hard to believe that he assumed Debian to just fork Linux…
“AI scrapers break the web, to use this page you’ll need JavaScript enabled.”
The ironic…
The point isn’t so much the quality of the code itself.
The point is that AI is an inefficient power-wasting piece of trash, and the data centres that power it have significant negative impacts on people and the environment, all for the sake of devs being lazy idiots. And you’d have to be an idiot to let AI take away your skills.
The point is also that this is the pre-enshittification version of AI, and any person or system foolish enough to become dependent on it will get exploited to the best of AI companies’ abilities.
If only there were some community of people who valued using free and open source software so we had options that were not dependent on the whims of companies. Then we could have software that we could depend on that isn’t dependent on the whims of corporations.
Throwing out AI because there are AI companies who causing harm is like giving up on Operating Systems because of the plethora of bad acts made by Microsoft.
I agree that everyone should avoid using OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other companies which were created to spend trillions of dollars buying up all computer hardware on the planet while building fossil fueled datacenters.
That isn’t the same as thinking that the actual machine learning technology itself is somehow inherently bad. There are many open weight models and FOSS projects that lets people use AI without contributing to the capitalist orgy that’s causing all of the secondary harms.
People conflating AI technology and AI companies are failing to diagnose the issue that we’re facing.
Open weight != open source.
You can can inspect open source software. You can compile the source into binary. You cannot inspect open binary. Well, you can, but it’s difficult. Can anyone ever inspect the fucking weights in a useful way? They are just bias numbers.
And all those AI models where made by requiring these companies and their data centers and their millions of dollars.
And all the cars were made requiring companies with their factories and their millions of dollars. And all the computers. And all the… Everything! WTF is your point?
Exactly! Well said. So many idiots here who think that AI=data center.
pre-enshittification?
Then what the hell are the models Windows is relying on if this is the GOOD stuff?
the opposite of “enshittified” isn’t “good.” some stuff sucks for fresh, new reasons before it enshittifies and turns to full on exploitative rent-seeking.
for example, anthropic quietly pulled claude code from their pro subscriptions and made it a separate subscription. that’s enshittification. and stupid AI bros are gonna fall for it every time.
Oh so it just goes from bad to worse? I see then
Usually in the context of profit milking by shareholders influencing that decline.
Yeah, my laptop is totally going to exploit me. I better not get hooked on using it. I’ll just leave it packed up in the box if came in, unplugged from the wall, so it doesn’t get a chance. /s
The point isn’t so much the speed and comfort of the commute itself.
The point is that a car is an inefficient power-wasting piece of trash, and the oil rigs that power it have significant negative impacts on people and the environment, all for the sake of commuters being lazy idiots. And you’d have to be an idiot to let a car take away your mobility.
I require a tone indicator.
This but unironically
Upvoted with the hope that you’re not trying to be ironic
We should all live in caves again, and wipe our butts with a handful of dry leaves.
Dude, no.
@ProdigalFrog
> “Pretending to have a “neutral stance” when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.”Bars. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision, I hope Antoine gets to keep his peace undisturbed.
Fascism is when people can use AI.
Not on its own, but an unfortunate goal of fascism is ruining education so that people have opinions like yours
So you agree with me, that AI is not fascist, but at the same time you say that one of goals of fascism is for people to think that AI is not fascist.
Am I reading it right?
You are, in fact, not reading that right.
Let me spell it for you because you apparently fell victim to the previously mentioned attack on education: AI is a tool. Like any tool it is not inherently evil, but the fascists love to take potentially useful tools and turn them around to cause as much suffering as possible. In this case, AI (more specifically LLMs) is used to make people reliant on it by getting them addicted to outsourcing all their problem solving skills while also reducing the value of art and artists of all types so they can take the money that artists would have made and also control ‘art’ (can’t have any pesky artists drawing pictures of people beating the nazis up) all the while sucking up every single data point about you.
If that’s all too complicated for you to understand, I guess you could over simplify it as “fascism is when AI”
Does that mean internet is fascist? Search engines? Calculators? Writing?
All of those things outsource your congnitive skills.
Almost nobody is saying that AI art generation is a complete subsitute for conventional art.
Even if all of that were true, it wouldn’t make AI fascist, but totalitarian.
Acting as if using an LLM is similar to using a calculator or search engine is a ridiculous comparison and further proves it’s not worth engaging with you further
So Open-Source and FOSS projects collectively decided that they want to jump on half-sunken ship in the middle of the ocean?
Amazing.
Is it a half sunken ship? I’ve been following AI in software for a while now, even though all signs point to failure and a crash, it just keeps going and people adopt it more.
Hot take: LLMs is the best thing has happened to open source movement:
- software copyright is defeated and basically eliminated in practice
- reverse engineering is so accessible that proprietary protocols cannot be hidden and can be reimplemented by AI agents as free software
- open weight LLMs are incredibly competitive and run on general hardware
- linux is de facto winner in all computing and rising in desktop and gaming niches
We’re literally in the golden age of free software
You’re conflating open source and free software with public domain. Open source software licenses are completely dependent on software copyright. This means that if software copyright were eliminated, open source licenses would become completely unenforceable. We may be headed in this direction anyway, but I just thought I would make the point.
It has been wild to see Linux users hope that the GPL is rendered unenforceable.
Absolutely!
Why? The entire purpose of GPL is to counteract copyright. If there is no copyright we no longer need GPL either.
The GPL gives you the right to access and modify the source code of software you use. A lack of copyrights does not mean that the creators have to share the source code with you. In fact, it means that anyone can take GPL software and turn it into closed source software
Sure but that’s mostly irrelevant in practice now. Gpl was notoriously unenforced so this aspect of “getting source code” almost never yielded to much in practice. FSF did a great job with limited resources it has but as code copyright is basically gone now and reverse engineering is so accessible we can actually empower real free software that is fully transparent and verifiable. If you imply that somehow we’ll start regressing existing tools to proprietary software I don’t see that at all.
@fruitcantfly @drmoose Just. Wrong. Clearly ‘Linux boosted’ is a worthless accolade.
Copyleft exists only because of copyright. If there is no copyright there’s no longer a need for copyleft.
I completely disagree. What’s the main thing the GPL does that is different from public domain or the complete absence of copyright?
It restricts how the code can be used in order to protect the writers and the consumers of the code. Without copyright and copyleft, any company can use any GPL code in any proprietary product they want, without sharing any of their changes and without even crediting the original writers. As an example, Microsoft could adopt the Linux kernel for Windows, heavily modify it, sell it, and stay completely silent about it, without any consequences. That’s what a world without copyright means for copyleft.
Sure but again this is only a problem if copyright exists. Stallman himself invented GPL due to frustrations of copyright. The permisiveness is default human behavior that was corrupted by evil people and terrible systems. The neutrrance of copyright just returns us to this default state of sharing.
That’s not true at all. Like I said, copyleft relies completely on copyright. It was not at all created in opposition to copyright. It was created in opposition to proprietary (i.e., “unfree”) software. Here, from the Wikipedia article on Copyleft (emphasis mine):
The concept of copyleft was described in Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto in 1985, where he wrote:[6]
GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.
This is impossible to do without copyright existing. Like I mentioned before, without copyright laws, companies can take any code they wish, with any license, and use it in their proprietary software without sharing their modifications.
Another reference directly from the FSF: “Copyleft is a tool that works within copyright law” (emphasis mine)
That would be cool and all, but people stopped reading their code. At work if I can not explain every line of my PR, it will get rejected. I use it as a powerful tool but a lot of people just output code and think their trash belongs in production.
Although I agree with you, I had that issue well before AI was a thing:
“I dunno, I just copied it from this StackOverflow post…”
<cut to me raging that someone would do that>
@drmoose @Grandwolf319 Assuming you place zero value on quality, yeah this is great.
Llms have been great for finding and fixing bugs and cranking out code, but the systems that allow for generation of code at a direct cost of dollars as opposed to the overhead of managing and employing programmers aren’t under the intense pressure to not redo old work and so are disincentivized from either creating or contributing to open source projects.
It’s simply not sustainable – not a single one of the major AI companies has ever made a single dollar in profit from an AI product. They will eventually get sick of spending money and investors will stop handing them more. The only question is when the money flow stops.
Time to learn HolyC and make your own
forkdenomination of TempleOS xDhalf-sunken ship
If you think the ship is ever sinking I’ve got bad news for you…
They can only burn so much money before investors stop giving it.
I’m not an AI evangelist but I am open-minded. I think Debian’s decision is balanced, and more importantly realistic.
There’s a difference between vibe coding and using AI to improve productivity. I’m a dev and pretty much everyone I know is using AI in some way. Yes they’ll lose contributors initially but Debian would lose more in the long run if they’d outright banned it.
For all those who are saying ‘AI supports fascists’ - the most popular models right now are Chinese. Very oppressive and paranoid government but definitely not fascist.
For all those that say ‘AI causes global warming’ - you’re correct, but unless you’ve got your own solar panels, so does your non-AI gaming rig. And your gas-driven car.
I disagree. You are an AI evangelist and quite closed-minded. Having a “balanced” approach, if there was one, would be to label any AI usage explicitly. If you’re afraid to label your AI usage, you’re a fucking coward.
But, damn, let’s not blame the billion dollar data centers for global warming, guys! It’s the individual decisions you make every day that kills the planet! If you believe this, the AI has fried your brain. It’s not one authoritarian government, it’s a different one! Actual paste-eating behavior. My work has improved with LLM usage! A common saying from people who were not good at their job, and are somehow now worse without them realizing it.
Any decent developer I have found has hated LLMs because they do not work anywhere near as well as people who are shit at things think they do. Personally, I don’t really like smashing the Skinner Box button hoping the output works this time because I like programming, and having Claude rape my codebase seems like a bad idea to me if I ever want to go back in there. But, then again, I like knowing how my code works, so maybe I should just lobotomize myself and I’ll understand why you like it so much.
Wow. You know, it is possible to have a discussion and even disagree with people without being a nasty peice of work?
I don’t have discussions with people that think the problem behind LLMs with high energy and water usage is that people use cars too much. Literally no one wants to subsidize their fucking local data center. Plus, you definitely ALSO use a car, so you’re not even better than the people you are trying to criticize because ChatGPT has rotted that portion of your brain from disuse. Frankly, I’ll be a nasty piece of work if it gets it through your thick fucking skull that AI is shit, most people know it’s shit, and you are likely shittier at everything you do using it. But, sure, complain about my tone, and never my message, because all you AI bros get so fucking butthurt by anyone saying anything bad about AI. Just call me a Luddite already or whatever and then go cry in your AI discord.
I don’t have discussions with people that think the problem behind LLMs with high energy and water usage
I didn’t say I didn’t think that was a problem, I was highlighting the hypocracy around it all.
Plus, you definitely ALSO use a car
Actually I dont. I dont own or use a car. My primary mode of transport is my own two legs.
so you’re not even better than the people you are trying to criticize
I didn’t say I was, you’re drawing conclusions based on what I haven’t said.
Frankly, I’ll be a nasty piece of work if it gets it through your thick fucking skull that AI is shit, most people know it’s shit, and you are likely shittier at everything you do using it.
You seem to think you’re some hero and doing the world a favour but you’re behaving like an opinionated bully. You are by far the vilest person I have encountered on here.
Even if every single fucking person on earth stopped driving their fucking car, global warming wouldn’t fucking stop because the vast majority of it is corporations’ fault, and those data centers are a major contributor to that. But subsidizing your lack of carbon footprint by using an LLM is a weird fucking flex, I guess. You were the one that brought up how using an LLM is like using a car, so sounds like you do care about that. But, sure, highlight the major pollution issues and not the fucking over poor people who have to subsidize your LLMs water and energy usage. My car didn’t make you pay double for your water bill like an asshole.
For all those that say ‘AI causes global warming’ - you’re correct, but unless you’ve got your own solar panels, so does your non-AI gaming rig. And your gas-driven car.
so fucking what? stop trying unless you’re perfect? every bit helps! fuck you
You’re vegan too, I presume, since animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to global warming?
all of agriculture is only like 1/5 of our emissions, and we need to eat.
Animal agriculture contributes between 10-20% of total ghg emissions, depending on the estimate.
The entire digital economy footprint, including AI and all internet infrastructure, is less than 4% of global emissions.
https://www.climatiq.io/blog/measure-greenhouse-gas-emissions-carbon-data-centres-cloud-computing
But sure, AI is the problem we should be focusing on.
I haven’t said anything about AI.
but that Xu et al 2021 paper has some dubious methodology. the conclusions might be correct but the methodology can’t prove it.
What is the issue with the methodology exactly? In any case, the lower end of estimates is still twice the emissions of all of the digital economy. We would do more for climate change going vegan than we would fighting data centers.
I mentioned AI because that is the topic of the thread we are in.
well I skimmed specifically for lca study combinations, and found them quickly. that invalidates all the data. if I read further, who knows what else i might find
open fire, he’s reaching!
no i’m not, but i have been reducing my meat intake a lot, because of global warming and ethical issues.
You typed this from a machine you know is causing global warming, hypocrite. That’s what.
That only works if you ignore the difference in scale.
My backyard campfire also adds CO2 to the atmosphere, but that doesn’t make the corporations any less responsible. They account for the supermajority of CO2 greenhouse gas emissions.
so fucking what? stop trying unless you’re perfect? every bit helps! fuck you
Every little bit helps, sure. But maybe it’s just me, wondering why you’re getting so upset at the small contributors on some random Internet forum.
From the outside, you look like you just want to find things to be upset at.
In my experience, you find what you go looking for.
You seem to miss that I just copied and pasted the comment that I was originally replying to. I was highlighting the hypocrisy, and your comment actually applies to the author of the text I copied and pasted. In effect, you have crafted my response for me. Thank you.
deleted by creator
Thanks. Fuck you specifically, too!
Now get off the Internet, you’re harming the environment with your electricity usage.
deleted by creator
A PC causes far less global warming than an AI datacenter. Like, it’s not even comparable.
so fucking what? stop trying unless you’re perfect? every bit helps! fuck you
Why don’t you start by turning off your device?
Exactly!
(You missed that my reply was a copy/paste of the comment I was roasting, and you have just given me the answer I gave them, which lead to your responding to me. The circle is complete, ad nauseum.)
what do you expect people to do? go full kaczynski and live in a cabin in the woods? and if that’s not acceptable for the person, they might as well burn down the amazon cause that’s basically the same anyway?
are you okay? are you having some mental issues? there are people that can help you.
this extreme black/white thinking combined with a defeatist attitude can’t be healthy in the long term, for you or the rest of the planet
No, that’s exactly what I’m trying to highlight. This person is criticizing others for using technology/electricity, while doing the exact same thing themselves. It’s hypocritical. There’s nothing that can be done until the system itself changes. Criticizing others does nothing but highlight the fact that you’re an idiot who is falling for the propaganda to keep people fighting amongst themselves, rather than targeting the system itself.
you’re doing a horrible job, might wanna rethink your methods
No one is paying me for this job, and it’s doomed to fail. It’s like yelling into the void. Whether I do it at one decibel level or another, the outcome is identical.
Oh go suck some fucking Billionaires dick some more. Maybe one day you’ll be good enough and get that trickle down.
Moron. Can’t tell the difference between a laptop and a data center.
I think it’s helpful to separate the problems of the technology itself from all the BS that big tech companies engage in when developing and pushing it.
Say you only use small, open-weight models that are hosted locally in a data center that is conscientious, environmentally clean, has strict data privacy policies and doesn’t pull the bullshit big-tech do.
You use them minimally and responsibly, you don’t over-rely on them. Is there a problem in that case?
You use them minimally and responsibly, you don’t over-rely on them. Is there a problem in that case?
Responsibly is the key word there. I.e. vibe-coding an entire project full of security risks without understanding the architecture or languages used. Vs. using LLMs to error check code, brainstorm a project, write code you feel confident you can review yourself.
Also, like you say, hosting locally. Or using a provider like Mistral that is European, not evil, uses France’s abundant nuclear power…
There is no such thing as Responsibly if there is no disclosure.
I sort-of agree, but what are you disclosing?
If a project on github was 100% vibe coded with no (initial) human review - I’d want to know that.
If a project was 60% hand coded, 40% vibes but reviewed by a human … yeah in the interests of openness it doesn’t hurt to disclose that.
If a project was 100% hand cranked but checked by an LLM? If its open source I’m not sure I need to know that.
If a project was 100% hand cranked and human-reviewed, is open source but the dev used an LLM to keep a to do list of tasks… no I don’t need to know that.
And like someone else pointed out - how exactly do you verify that AI was not used at all for any part of a project?
Also, you know Microsoft will be vibe-coding its products. Would that stop you using Windows, Xbox, M365 etc?
Re: your last point, I am definitely moving away from Microsoft products for that very reason. We were discussing Linux here, right? It’s become a headache to find a distro I feel ethical and safe about using.
Agreed. I think they should have pushed for stronger disclosure requirements, but I also realise that isn’t actually enforceable.
I also find it very telling that people will talk about the negative parts of AI, but not acknowledge other automation tools that perpetuate the same problems. My experience is that most people’s complaints have a real basis, but they are just mis-diagnosed.
The problems seem to be our economic and societal structures, and AI is the new fancy tool that exacerbates those problems. But I’ve not heard a good reason why AI itself is that problem.
Also, a ban without control isn’t a ban. And making sure that not a single line of code was writen with the help of some AI seems more than complicated… is it just possible?
And how much working time would it take to audit all packages to make sure it is 100% wrote by some human?
It seems more realistic (and more honnest) to allow the part that would not be found by a reasonable audit of the code.
Who said 100% was the goal? We don’t ever have 100% guaranteed exploit free code, or 100% guaranteed spyware free code, etc. The point is you send a message and try your best if you think those are worthwhile goals to attain.
The people saying “but we can’t possibly stop all usage, so why try” aren’t being pragmatic; imo they’re giving up. My assumption is because they don’t want to confront the nasty externalities of their own ai use.
The same could be said of a lot of technologies that enable greater corporate capture at the expense of the environment and overall human wellbeing—and we should be doing something about those as well.
I agree with you, and from my understanding (which could be inaccurate) the position of debian is to avoid a part of the use of that technology they judge both wrong and avoidable.
My own nasty use of AI is mostly to find back the name or syntaxe of functions I seldom use, and sometimes to explain me some theorical points. I admit it is wrong and only spares me only a few hours a week at most compared to stack overflow and online tutorials.
And my laziness would probably make me accept the existance of one model that would be a public property democraticaly controled ; which would consume less ressources than having many concurrents, and avoid the profit-oriented and corporate mindsets (I imagine them being the main source of threat)…
very oppressive and paranoid, bit definitely not fascist.
That is … an interesting take, especially taking the Uyghur genocide into account.
Not a genocide. No mass killings. Pure propaganda pushed by a CIA plant named Adrian Zenz. (You should look into him; he’s a religious zealot who believes his Agency-promoted investigation is a mission from God.) The UN’s own report from 2022 never uses the word genocide. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/08/1125932
It is an anti-radicalization education program put in place because the CIA was arming and training groups of Uyghurs with the intent of creating terrorist cells, just like they’ve done in bunches of other countries.
The word “genocide” should never be used lightly. What Israel is doing to the people of occupied Palestine? That’s a genocide.
Fascism is far-right. China is sort-of Communist, which is far-left.
Thus China is not fascist. Still a brutal, oppressive borderline-genocidal regime, but not fascist.
I know what China pretends to he, but that they are is really not that far off plain good old fascism
You know its true because we get down voted for talking about it
Communism is just a label very easy to roleplay for control (see: .ml).
China is authoritarian, and that’s sort of the problem. That’s why the US is bad, bozo. But, sure, why don’t we point out all the definitely not capitalism that China is doing so you can pretend that all those Uyghurs aren’t being genocided, nor that the AI surveillance state they’ve got going on to censor and disappear people. Damn, dude, I’m glad I can pick between these two shitty governments.
Oh I’m not perfect so everything bad is OK argument. Like we need at this time to be burning more fossil fuels.
deleted by creator
Right? We should all shut off our computers at once, and never turn them on again. That will fix it!
i understand there are a lot of facist AI companies, but how can an entire technology be facist?
That’s like saying space travel is facist because pretty much all of it was built on work by literal nazi scientists.
Do we throw out all the related advances too? Satellite communications, GPS, etc.?
Good question. I think there’s some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It’s also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology…
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They’re under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they’re kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn’t yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water…
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents’.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car… 400 TV channels… a more precise weather forecast… We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil… I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn’t just forced upon me by oligarchs…
The printing press has been a crucial tool for fascist propagandists ever since its inception. Does that make the technology fascist?
I just got done reading The Demon Haunted World, and can’t help but draw a comparison. It’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid for the future of democracy right now, but it really feels like people think AI is powered by literal sprites, dancing around on puppet strings at the whim of the fascists who summoned them. It’s math. Math isn’t ideological. It is simply a fact of the universe that an LLM is possible.
Yeah, we have to make sure it is applied responsibly, because yeah it’s a very powerful phenomenon. Yes, they were made using stolen information, and I fully believe that all LLMs and training data should be fully open sourced for public use as a result, and making any profit from them is unethical. It’s stealing from Peter and Paul to sell to Peter and Paul.
But one day fascists are bound to fail, and you know what will still exist in the world that comes next? AI/LLMs/some future iteration of a transformer-based neural network. It’s not the first technology loved and/or invented by fascists, and it won’t be the last. But I think in a panic, people are willing to burn down anything in an 50ft radius of any fascist. Keep the knowledge, ditch the fascism, stop acting out of fear.
I really think those are two different pairs of shoes. The printing press allowed people to make information more accessible to the masses. A lot of people got more educated because of it. Of course as a tool it can also be used for evil. But in reality that’s not what happened. It’s mainly been used for good. It displaced some jobs, but that wasn’t the people’s jobs, but monks in the scriptorium. Other people got to learn to read and write because of it. In fact we went from being able to read as something special, to almost everyone gets to learn to read because of it.
With AI on the other hand (or foot, to stick with the ‘pairs of shoes’ metaphor) it’s gonna be your job and the monks/aristocrats get their scriptorium back to cook up the information of tomorrow, it’s the other way round. It’ll cost entry level jobs. We have reports on how it leads to deskilling. There’s a good chance it’ll make people more stupid. And on average they already got a 30sec attention span thanks to AI’s online predecessors.
And once we adopt it without “fear”, you’ll get schoolbooks with the information/propaganda the ministry of education prompted for.
It’ll also intensify all the biases and stereotypes out there. If you’re gay or black and the AI has been trained on white straight men’s information… Tough luck. It won’t work for you. I already got this, and I’m not even any of that. Called some shitty AI customer service and twice I had some non-standard issues. It’s never of any help with those. It’s good and efficient at handling the standard customer service case. But once you’re the outlier… There’s no training material and no proper procedure in the harness and you’re basically screwed. I think that’s kinda fascist to demand all people are some homogeneous flock of sheep, and the company never makes mistakes while selling something, otherwise consumers (inadvertandly?) get thrown overboard.
We can also see how it’s a burden on my favourite Free Software projects and independent internet infrastructure. We get hammered by the scrapers, bot armies, everyone gets drowned in pull requests and exploits. While Microsoft and Facebook get to make a profit. They also get to release a new Windows version with a botched German translation. But I don’t think I see a lot of yield for the Free Software community. I’ve tried a few AI-assisted and vibe-coded projects. And they’re mostly shit. And/or discontinued after a week. Counterexamples do exist, but they’re really far and in between. While I and my peer group, we’re still at the receiving end of all the harm caused.
The printing press is way more egalitarian. It doesn’t favour printing the bible over any other book. Heck, you can even print radical new ideas. AI will try to push you towards the old stuff it’s seen in the training material due to the way it works. And whatever the tech oligarchs deem acceptable. (And that’s another factor, the printing press isn’t controlled by the Chinese government, nor the corrupt US tech bros.)
I really don’t think it’s a neutral tool. It’s the opposite of that. And many tools aren’t neutral. For example guns. Some countries hand them out like there’s no tomorrow. Issue is, they’re force intensifiers and disproportionately used by criminals, mentally ill people… people with a will to use them for what they’re good at, accidents happen… You can have a look at the numbers and compare it to other countried where the citizens are more fearful of guns. Those put strict regulation on top and get 10x less crime in return. And an ungodly amount less gun violence. That’s because the world isn’t neutral towards small metal barrels which fire projectiles. You’d think they’re just a device. But it’s way more complicated than that once we factor in reality.
But yeah, you’re right. Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those. After that we can try to come up with some hypothetical, better version of AI. One that comes with equity, a level playing field. Something which doesn’t reinforce stereotypes. Doesn’t steal from poor people and return investment to the rich and powerful. It’s a massive challenge, and completely science fiction unless we do the first step.
Idk, maybe I’m just more subscribed to realism. I’m not opposed to the existence of the concept of mathematics. But I’ll judge a tool by what it’s actually used for. Not what could happen if the world were a different one than the one we live in.
You’re totally right about the current state of affairs with AI technology. It has been misused for net negative outcomes…
But. The very first application of nuclear fission was wiping out two cities in the blink of an eye. Should we have immediately declared all nuclear tech as evil/facist and thrown it away? Of course not… there was a lot of fear mongering about nuclear power in the years that followed, but i’m glad that we now have clean, reliable nuclear generators and other nuclear enabled tech.
I don’t think this is a valid way to argue. Let’s assume what you say is true, and think again:
Humanity declares all nuclear fission to be fascist tech and never develops mutual destruction, nor nuclear power plants. Now they have some oil crisis in the 70s and they’re forced to invest massively in renewables. Develop high yield solar cells earlier than we did. Now it’s 2000. The whole planet runs on clean energy, in fact there’s cheap energy in abundance. Economy is booming and by 2020 everyone has a flying car. Also the cold war never happened and everyone in the middle east has been living in peace for 50 years because there wasn’t many proxy wars between the US and USSR… Awesome! It was exactly the right move to immediately declare it evil and throw it out.
(Subsequently they have to deal with the massive energy surplus during daytime. That’s bled off in large datacenters and used to calculate the cure to cancer, the flu etc, which is done by 2030. Now they’re calculating the holy grail.)
Are you actually saying nuclear power is an inherently facist technology that should have been ended before it started?
Space travel, satellites, and all related tech are also facist
IBM worked with the nazis, so throw out your phone and your computers…
nothing in this world will ever pass lemmy’s purity tests…
Honestly, i’m pretty sure both of us are on the same page… but lemmy demands that things be black and white, good and evil. You havr to be 100% against AI or be labelled a facist enabler
I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding.
You laid down a hypothetical situation. It was kinda your idea to talk about an alternate reality where humanity thinks nuclear is fascist… You said lets assume everyone thinks it is, what would be the consequences? And I said, yeah, let’s assume that for the sake of argument. And I went with it. That doesn’t make it my opinion.
I guess what I mainly wanted to say is: We’re writing science fiction stories here. Nobody knows what would have happened if history had been very different. You’re simply asserting it would have turned out bad. But it could also have turned out great. All we know is this timeline. So we’re bound to think every change from the status quo must be worse. But we don’t necessarily live in the best of possible worlds. Maybe the absence of nuclear power would be bad. Maybe it’d be great, as I laid down. Why shouldn’t it?
Please let’s stop with the escalation here. Nobody talked about IBM or space travel. And we’re definitely on the same page with refusing to make everything some radical extreme.
Consider that you’re comparing hundreds of years of the printing press without much lived-context, vs about 3 years of LLMs in the context of the country you live in. It’s not the case that when the printing press was invented, that suddenly everyone had access to a bunch of free, unbiased information. It was a complex piece of machinery, it took decades to be adopted widely, and when it did, it wasn’t in the hands of the proletariat at first. The people wielding it most effectively were kings. And in the present day, if you live in China today, odds are you are not nearly as pessimistic about the advent of AI as people in the west, primarily because your government has actively taken steps to make you feel safe. Most recently, China made it outright illegal to replace workers with AI. Say what you will about China, but I think americans would like to see something even 1/10th this effective right now.
I otherwise can’t disagree with your summary of the current sad state of AI. The only part I would contend with is that, while it can be misused to “make people more stupid”, when wielded correctly it is also a great tool for education. It is able to point you in the right direction of the information you’re looking for faster than any other algorithm. Like with any new information, you have to be trained in the ways of skepticism. You have to know how to vet the output for yourself. But it’s so much faster at finding that relevant information for vetting than combing through reams of irrelevant text, or renting time from a domain expert, if you’re privileged enough to have access to one. Used correctly, LLMs are an incredible accelerator for learning.
And while not all open models are full open-training, there are many viable open-weight models that you can both fine-tune on your own content, and run locally so that no one is MITMing your prompts; and they do rival the best that openai/anthropic/etc. have to offer. There is currently a whole ecosystem of normal people iterating on various open models outside of the purview of the oligarchs. Yes, we’re in a hardware shortage right now, which super sucks, but we’re still talking on the order of thousands to 10s of thousands to have your own model running, not hundreds of thousands to millions.
Outside of LLMs, we are seeing breakthroughs in healthcare. A year ago, doctors were leveraging AI to significantly speed up chemo treatment schedules, leading to a measurable number of lives saved. And just last week we saw Moderna announce a personalized cancer vaccine pass phase 3 testing! The ability to create a personalized vaccine that teaches your immune system how to fight your cancer cells in spite of them constantly mutating was thought to be impossible even 5y ago. Meanwhile, the work is still ongoing, but AI seems promising in its ability to approximate solutions to previously intractable problems in fusion power generation.
Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those.
Yep, that’s all I’m claiming. To me, the active ingredient for fascism is fear. The internet could be full of all the slop propaganda that grok can cook up, but if people aren’t afraid of their neighbors or afraid of losing their livelihood, it’s all rendered powerless. We can take 100 specific steps to combat fascism, but to quote one of my favorite metal albums, “the fear is what keeps us here”.
Hmmh. I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes. Those were medieval times. Everything was slow to impossible. Nowadays I can communicate information from here to America within a fraction of a second. Back then they weren’t even aware of the Americas. And there wasn’t any hardware store to buy the material needed. They had to invent the oil-based paint, have a bunch of workers dig up the metal, cut down trees, carpenters and goldsmiths… Nonetheless within 40 years they went from invention to 110 printing presses all across Europe. I think that’s crazy fast given the situation. And it really took off after that. Not long after we got it to carry the Reformation. And some century later the Scientific Revolution. (And none of those we’re good things for the kings.)
And 3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago. It’s been 50 years since the first AI hype with expert systems. 40 years since the second AI winter. And now 4 years after the breakthrough of LLMs. It’s really difficult to compare the two. And I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere close to proper AI. They’re great and all. But also fairly limited in what they can do. For example they can’t update their weights while running. So there’s no learning nor adapting to the environment. Even remembering something isn’t really possible and has to be added on top. And I wonder if we can make them reliable enough for some tasks. Seems impossible to me with current tech. We still need some time to develop the first customer service chatbot which isn’t vulnerable to prompt injection or which doesn’t on occasion “hallucinate” terms and services and procedures. And just lie to the customers.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear. It’s certainly a thing. But I don’t think it is mainstream complaint #1 anymore. I come from a culture where we often meet new things with a healthy(?) dose of skepticism. I don’t see anything wrong with that. And a lot of the criticism regarding AI isn’t concerned with fear. It’s about Elon Musk putting up 6 dirty (and slightly illegal) gas power plants next to your backyard. Sam Altman polluting the environment and making electricity, computer chips and everything more expensive for you. And some idiots starting an investment bubble that requires AI to displace 30% of the human workforce by 203x or it will pop and have catastrophic effects on the stock exchange, including your retirement fund. I mean I’m positive we’ll manage to get by in some form… But I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes.
Totally fair. I think the relevant difference is that we’re still in the middle of the advent of this technology, we still have a hardware shortage that limits access to it, and it began as we were already entering a crisis era and economic downturn. From our vantage point, we only see the damage caused by the tech, not the potential long term impact, and we are (rationally) assuming the worst.
But if a new scientific revolution could happen as a result of AI for the betterment of humanity, do we want to accidentally prevent that by throwing it out with fascism?
(And if that is in our future, the next question historians 500y from now will ask is, could it have even been avoided? Much like we could ask now, was there a timeline where the original printing presses were destroyed out of fear of corrupting the masses? And realistically, how long would that have lasted before a new one was built?)
3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago.
But we both know that when people say “fuck AI” they’re not talking about anything other than generative AI made in the last few years.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear…I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
Fear has defined the Trump era for the last 10+ years. It is why countries all over the world are tilting to the right. It is the necessary ingredient for fascism to gain traction. It happened during the great depression all over the world, even in the US, and it’s happening now.
I’m not saying it’s an unnatural or unreasonable reaction, I’m saying it’s causing democracies to be prone to rash decisions. If you recall, this thread is about the use of AI in FOSS projects. The most prominent sentiment by 99% of people in this thread is “fuck AI, burn it down and anyone who uses it”. And if that fear-based reaction is what prevents well-meaning, intelligent open source maintainers from being allowed to leverage an objectively powerful phenomenon to responsibly and ethically usher in a new scientific/FOSS revolution, we would be remiss to stifle that opportunity out of fear.
Edit: and to be completely honest, I don’t know who is upvoting me, because it’s very uncharacteristic of randos to follow a thread this dense between two people. I get the sense that there are bots in this thread voting for/against their favorite ideologies.
Hmmh. I sometimes struggle to emphasize. I don’t live in the US. Culture and politics are a bit different here. We certainly have those dynamics as well. But I don’t think we’re (yet) at a majority of the population living in constant fear. We Germans tend to be less open towards new technology, though. For other reasons. We always sell our souls to American big tech eventually. But it’s always met with some initial reluctance/backlash.
I’m not sure about your point about fascism. I mean there’s some inflation with how people use the word… But proper fascism is really, really bad. All my grandparents had to suffer through it. Somehow they survived. But it cost like 70 million lives. And most cities here were turned into burning piles of trash. You kinda want to avoid it. Even at a substantial cost. And my place isn’t the only example. We have plenty wars and fascists on earth. Constantly. Fear isn’t the right tool to avoid it, though. Being clever and education are good strategies.
Ultimately it’s certainly hard to judge some hypothetical future. I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies. I mean they sometimes do come up with good products. Sometimes their path to profit is scattered with dead bodies. Could be anything unless there’s accountability and regulation. And it’s not either/or… We could as well have some less nasty company do the research. Or do it a bit more slowly… Maybe that’ll take 10 years longer but we get less people killed and less permanent harm done to the environment. There’s not just one path forwards.
I fully agree on the atmosphere and sentiment,. It’s really hard to talk about AI. Especially online. Everyone is yelling and doing identity politics. Most people don’t have a clue how it works. And/or they believe in some falsehoods. I think the best way is to just tell it how it is. Quite a lot of people won’t listen. But they’re not listening anyways.
Be a bit careful with the evil companies, though. I don’t think Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Elon Musk or the Chinese government act in your, or my best interest. I’d advise not to be naïve about that. They always tell nice stories. Promise all kinds of stuff. Politicians do the same thing. It’s their job. It doesn’t have to come true, though, by any means. In fact the more they promise, the more likely it is they’re trying to manipulate you.
This isn’t really connected to the technology and science though. Whether AI is going to succeed and improve from a scientific perspective is yet another can of worms. I still strongly doubt LLMs are going to be the direct predecessor to strong AI or something properly “clever”, but we’ll see about that.
You can train a model. Today.
You got a spare $80 million laying around to train one?
I don’t care for sea lions, since I can train a model on my machine today.
Calling out the top-end number of the broligarchs makes you sound like you are either attempting to be sensationalist - or worse are arguing about something you don’t fully understand
Care to share your achievement? So we can learn something?
I’m flattered you think I have the money for that, but I really don’t. People do all kinds of silly stuff as a hobby. But even engineering an airplane in my garage is more achievable than this. And then they bought up all the computer chips and GPUs to make it even more unaffordable. And the way law works, I’ll go to jail after pirating 20 books. It’s just the tech oligarchy who’s allowed to steal. That’s another level of associated fascism. We don’t get equity. There’s different rules for different people.
For Zuck et al it’s alright to torrent porn, pirate all the Hollywood movies out there, music… Musk can keep his revenge porn service… But @hendrik: Straight to jail if they try.
Sure, because what we need is more environmental destruction.
This comment makes no sense. How is training a local model on my machine destroying the environment?
tools shape our perception of the world, and in turn us. neutrality is tacit approval. when a fascist company develops a technology, and some people say “we don’t want technology developed by fascists”, the “compromise” position is “you could have some technology developed by fascists”
if you look into operation paperclip and all the politics following that, you’ll see that there was a ton of pushback. the german scientists were literal nazis, but in the worst way; they were the compromising kind. only that the compromise was between “kill people” and “don’t kill people”, so the result was “kill some people”. and living in that environment changes your perception of the world. as the song goes, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? that’s not my department” says wehrner von braun
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”
Over the past 5 years or so, I have really come to despise the phrase “just a tool”.
Honestly “just a tool” is the same as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The phrase frames the context as if EVERY tool can have plenty of reasonable non-destructive purposes.
One argument is that those who make LLMs have a high amount of control their output. It’s giving a lot of control of open source to the whims of those companies to become reliant on LLMs
Think about the potential for providers to add plausibly deniable backdoors, general lower quality code, etc. when they think you are working on a project they care about. The precedent is there with Anthropic publicly stating that Fable was built to intentional sabotage quality when they think you are working on AI research related tasks or distillation. That kind of stuff can be subtly baked into open models as well
Honestly it feels like I’m taking crazy pills some days. I run local models on my system, and the technology is legitimately fascinating. I am not talking about the broligarchy, merely the underlying technology is weird and fun to play with.
One thing is for certain - the box Pandora had this thing lying around in has been kicked open, and it cannot be shut. We’ll just have to figure out what that means for all of us.
Tell us more. Your ideas sound unique.
edit: do you all actually need a /s to see sarcasm?
Go fuck yourself with your tired, “bUt WhAt aBoUt VaCciNeS,” argument.
Search up on TESCREAL!
Why would I of you’re not even impressed or shocked or whatever by it to tell us what it is or why we would want to
i understand there are a lot of facist AI companies, but how can an entire technology be facist?
AI companies and governments are spreading anti-ai propaganda to push for regulations that will benefit them and limit the usage people can do of the technology.
Good, someone with morals
If they had those, they wouldn’t be wasting electricity by being on the Internet. Causing global warming with their use of technology. They’d be sitting in a cave, meditating to reduce the harm they cause to the environment.
Yet you use a computer, curious! I am very intelligent.
You, too? Nice! That makes two intelligent people.
Want to do something really intelligent together? Like try to enforce a ban on AI even though it’s use is undetectable and fundamentally it’s just math?
you not being able to detect LLM use is not our problem
🤣
You not being able to detect the eye color of someone over the phone is not anyone else’s problem.
That’s a false equivalence. And besides they polute on massivelly different scales
It’s not a false equivalence. You can’t applaud someone ruining the environment to condemn someone ruining the environment. It’s ludicrous.
It’s also not inherently massively different scales. For all you know they posted from a super computer connected to a coal generator, to complain about AI being operated on a Raspberry Pi powered by solar.
Then you clearly have no idea what a false equivalence is
That’s a false equivalence.
Well what would the disclosure requirement improve? It’s unenforceable and it just gets in the way of evaluating the code based on quality. Every code should have high standards. Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.
If a project allows llm contributions then disclosing it will only make people wary of the wrong things. Putting a badge on it is not helpful anymore if it’s allowed. I have seen good llm code and bad human code.
Code is a liability. The only thing that balances it out is people who understand the code. The people are the asset.
If you contribute LLM-generated code but not your understanding, you’ve essentially taken out a loan in the maintainers’ names.
Building tech debt you never pay down is the way you kill open source projects.
Not only the contributor has to understand code. There have always been flyby contributers that just add their code and that’s it. So if a PR adds code that cannot be maintained by others it can’t be added. That is part of the review process. That is part of evaluating based on quality. It’s unimportant if a human or an llm wrote something unmaintainable.
Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.
Bad LLM code is worse than bad human code. LLMs sanitize out markers that humans use to catch and correct mistakes.
I have experienced both.
The Free Software Foundation of Europe recently published an article detailing why it’s legally quite important for developers to disclose and carefully catalog which code was created by LLMs.
https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html
Recommendations for AI usage in Free Software contributions
With these issues in mind, the recently published Recommendations When Using LLM-Backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions by the SFC outlines some of the legal difficulties for copyright and licensing that generative systems have created for software developers who wish to write, maintain, or contribute to Free Software projects.
Notably for the purposes of this article, the SFC recommends the full recording and disclosure of how and when an AI tool was used to assist in the creation of a contribution. As stated by the SFC:
“FOSS project leaders cannot make good decisions about LLM-gen-AI policy if they cannot survey which contributions were assisted, and how much they are assisted. Part of the contribution process should (at least) include a disclosure of what LLM-gen-AI system was used, its version (as these system change over time), and a brief description of how the system assisted the contributor. This information should be included in a machine-readable format in commit logs."
Indeed, such disclosure can be an important foundational step to allow for the accurate assessment of the copyrightability of code that has been assisted or generated by AI tools, in order to assess their licensability into Free Software. Open and clear disclosure is a helpful step for the Free Software community to maintain a healthy licensing ecosystem, which is currently threatened by the legal uncertainties that come with the advent of generative AI.
Additionally, it is worthwhile for developers to document in some capacity the extent of human work that they have done in their software projects, whether it be the writing of code, the selection and arrangement of components within the project, or the extent of human modification of machine generated content.
IANAL but from my naive perspective it might make more sense to not disclose this because no one can prove that something was written by AI if no one discloses it. That means for me that any claims that a certain part cannot be copyrighted are hard or even impossible to make.
FYI it’s wary. Weary means you’re tired. Wary is to beware of something.
What wrong things?
And here I was suspecting myself of looking for elitism for my thoughts of switching to some *BSD system
Yeah, I just heard the results of the vote yesterday (been traveling), so I plan on trying to replace Debian with NetBSD on my laptop as soon as I catch up post-vacation.
the distro you like is enshitifying so you’re switching to an OS with an even more permissive, business-friendly license, huh? why not find another GPL OS instead?
Project is permissive. Company takes it and distributes binary. Nerds don’t use it and look for the og, since the license forces the company to disclose that they just did that in a way or another. The end.
Project is copyleft. Company takes it and distributes source via GitHub file uploading a zip named after a date or some dumb shit. The original maintainer is now bullied into adapting the code. Sooner or later, the company now has influence over the project. Which is how we ended up with that Debian decision the top post is about, and with completely undocumented drivers right inside of the official Linux tree.
because I am not switching. another Linux project gives out some suspicious sounds, so I find myself thinking that moving to another OS altogether might turn out a good idea after all, besides the fun of learning something new
Is there another GPL OS instead? I am a fan of the GNU Hurd, but sadly I cannot run it on my hardware. The team of devs is really small, and it is amazing what they have done in all these years.
