Unfortunately one caveat would be it will be difficult to separate the maintainers from the financial incentives, so it won’t be a fair comparison. (e.g. the labs funding full time maintainers with salaries and donations that other distros can only dream of)
> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models.
I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright?
> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.
This is massively overblown. If they'd specifically said that their concerns were around the concentrated impact of energy and water usage on specific communities, fine, but then you'd have to have ethical concerns about a lot of other tech including video streaming; but the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech products.
> The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality.
Is this talking about automation? You know what else automated employees and can often reduce service quality? Software.
> LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.
So did email.
Absolutely not! Every major FOSS license has copyright as its enforcement method -- "if you don't do X (share code with customers, etc depending on license) you lose the right to copy the code"
> I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright?
No free and open source software (FOSS) distribution model is "anti-copyright." Quite to the contrary, FOSS licenses are well defined[0] and either address copyright directly or rely on copyright being retained by the original author.
FOSS still has to exist within the rules of the system the planet operates under. You can't just say "I downloaded that movie, but I'm a Linux user so I don't believe in copyright" and get away with it
>the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech products.
[citation needed]
>Is this talking about automation? You know what else automated employees and can often reduce service quality? Software.
Disingenuous strawman. Tech CEO's and the like have been exuberant at the idea that "AI" will replace human labor. The entire end-goal of companies like OpenAI is to create a "super-intelligence" that will then generate a return. By definition the AI would be performing labor (services) for capital, outcompeting humans to do so. Unless OpenAI wants it to just hack every bank account on Earth and transfer it all to them instead? Or something equally farcical
>So did email.
"We should improve society somewhat"
"Ah, but you participate in society! Curious!"
Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at
generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They
are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful
enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point,
they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo
projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from
developers and users to review contributions and detect the
mistakes resulting from the use of AI.
It's literally just an opinion.
> It's literally just an opinion.
The definition of "refute"[0] is:
to prove wrong by argument or evidence : show to be false or erroneous
You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone has theirs. They're literally just "thoughts and feelings". They may masquerade as arguments from time to time, much to my dismay, but rest assured: there's nothing to "refute", debate, or even dispute on them. Not in general, nor in this specific case either.
Consider:
"This show is shit. The pacing is terrible, and the writing is cringe. Nobody should watch this garbage."
A reasoning most difficult to refute indeed. It's shit, because the person thinks it's shit, just in two other, more specific ways. And nobody should watch it, because they think it's shit, and (presumably) think that shit shows shouldn't be watched. A most terrific derivation of all times for sure.
Thinking an opinion can be refuted is analogous to thinking that definitions can be proven false. Which is to say, utterly misguided and plain wrong. They (opinions) are assertions of belief, with any use of logic in them just being rhetorical garnish, if not outright a diversion.
1 - Publicity stunt
In an effort to get more attention for the Gentoo project,
the maintainers created an outlandish policy to drive
traffic. This would seem unlikely due to the policy
decision being voted upon over a year ago.
2 - Fear of LLM's replacing Gentoo maintainers
This appears to not be the case based on the Gentoo minutes[0] provided:
Policy on AI contributions and tooling
======================================
Motion from the email thread:
> It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has
> been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing
> artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should
> a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical
> and quality concerns.
The vote was 6y/0n/1a (all present members voted yes).
sam noted as obiter dicta that the mail also mentioned:
> This explicitly covers all GPTs, including ChatGPT and Copilot, which is
> the category causing the most concern at the moment. At the same time,
> it doesn't block more specific uses of machine learning to problem
> solving.
Several council members noted that we will revisit the policy if and
when circumstances change and that it isn't intended to permanent,
at least not in its current form.
3 - Experience with LLM-based change requests
If the policy is neither a publicity stunt nor fear of
LLM's replacing maintainers, then the simplest explanation
remaining which substantiates the policy is maintainers
having experience with LLM use and then publishing their
decisions therein.
4 - There is a very active anti-LLM activist movement and they care more about participating in it than they care about free software.
For example, see their rationale, which are just canned anti-LLM activist talking points. You see the same ones repeated and memed ad nauseam if you lurk on anti-AI spaces.
The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR.
That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes.
I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review to show I care about quality.
LLMs increase review burden a ton but I would say it can be a fair tradeoff.
It’s just what every other tech bro on here wants to believe, that using LLM code is somehow less pure than using free-range-organic human written code.
I’d be curious how much energy gentoo consumes versus a binary distro.
There was a time that I used Gentoo, and may again one day, but for the past N years, I’ve not had time to compile everything from source, and compiling from source is a false sense of security, since you still don’t know what’s been compromised (it could be the compiler, etc.), and few have the time or expertise to adequately review all of the code.
It can be a waste of energy and time to compile everything from source for standard hardware.
But, when I’m retired, maybe I’ll use it again just for the heck of it. And I’m glad that Gentoo exists.
The end result is not necessarily a bad one, and I think reasonable for a project like Gentoo to go for, but the policy could be stated in a much better way.
For example: thou shalt only contribute code that is unencumbered by copyright issues, contributions must be of a high quality and repeated attempts to submit poor quality contributions may result in new contributions not being reviewed/accepted. As for the ethical concerns, they could just take a position by buying infrastructure from companies that align with their ethics, or not accepting corporate donations (time or money) from companies that they disagree with.
This isn't a court system, anyone intentionally trying to test the boundaries probably isn't someone you want to bother with in the first place.
this is a bad faith comment.
Highly disingenuous. First, AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is. Though I have to agree that this is the relatively strongest ethical claim to stop using AI but stands weak if looked at on the whole.
The fact that they mentioned "energy and water use" should tell you that they are really looking for reasons to disparage AI. AI doesn't use any more water or energy than any other tool. An hour of Netflix uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions. A single 10 hour flight (per person*) emits as much as around 100k GPT prompts. It is strange that one would repeat the same nonsense about AI without primary motive being ideological.
"The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality." this is just a shoddy opinion at this point.
To be clear - I understand why they might ban AI for code submissions. It reduces the barrier significantly and increases the noise. But the reasoning is motivated from a wrong place.
Also, half the problem isn’t distribution, it’s how those works were acquired. Even if you suppose models 44are transformative, you can’t just download stuff from piratebay. Buy copies, scan them, rip them, etc.
It’s super not cool that billion dollar vc companies can just do that.
"The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."
I agree it is debatable but it is not so cut and clear that it is _not_ transformative when a judge has ruled that it is.
It's not a question of if feeding all the worlds books into a blender and eating the resulting slurry paste is copyright infringement. It's that they stole the books in the first place by getting them from piracy websites
If they'd purchased every book ever written, scanned them in and fed that into the model? That would be perfectly legal
perching_aix•1h ago
tptacek•1h ago
blibble•1h ago
no, "AI" was dogshit a year ago when post was written, "AI" is dogshit today, and "AI" will still be dogshit in a year's time
and if it was worth using (which it isn't), there's still the other two points: ethics and copyright
and don't tell me to "shove this concern up your ass."
(quoted verbatim from Ptacek's magnum opus: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/)
jatora•50m ago
tldr: "cope"
tptacek•42m ago
malfist•41m ago
People say this every month.
tptacek•20m ago
notherhack•40m ago