The only question I have is why. Genuinely.
Debian exists. It has existed for decades. It works. “Oh but AI makes it faster” so fucking what? We didn’t need “faster” for years whilst it worked fine, it’s not a product on a deadline.
That’s true. Nonetheless the maintainers seem to see AI as a valid way to reduce their workload.
As someone who has done package management for a distro at one point in my life… after the initial push, it is so incredibly boring.
I think AI should do all of it. I’m entirely certain that things would be better, not worse, if we did. 99% of problems related to that stuff is because it’s so fucking boring that humans just simply cannot pay the kind of attention it requires to be safe.
Current AI is still like that incredibly knowledgeable senior dev with a drug problem. Everything done by AI still needs to be checked by a human in case the AI just hallucinated the wildest shit even though it did the same thing just right ten times before.
Right now, AI is a great tool. It will probably become reliable enough to replace human maintainers. But no one knows when that happens.Current AI is still like that incredibly knowledgeable senior dev with a drug problem.
So you mean exactly like most package maintainers prior to AI?
No community distro has the capacity to fork thousands of packages and maintain them. That’s what a true no Ai policy would require. I also have to add that the Linux kernel itself would need to be forked and then maintained. Just the latter point alone is enough to make all this moot.
Completely missing the point.
No this was for Debian only.
At first I was afraid that they would allow for an irresponsible use. But no, they explicitly say “responsible”, so that danger is no more. I’m very much relieved.
Also they explicitly mention that humans will remain accountable. Not Nature, or Fate, or the gods; mark that. Good thinking there!
Problems solved.
They basically pass the buck to the individual developer without taking any responsibility themselves.
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material.
The responsibility for every contribution rests with the contributor who submits it, who remains accountable for its technical quality, legal acceptability, and suitability for inclusion in Debian.
“It may be illegal or against FOSS, but that’s up to you to decide, good luck I guess”
This is good news; Debian is still the way to go for me:
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material. The Project does not seek to resolve these unsettled legal questions through this General Resolution, nor does it adopt a position on whether AI-generated output is, in whole or in part, copyrightable or derived from copyrighted works.
As long as they don’t allow AI bots to submit changes, this is probably a realistic decision. Assuming that code generated by AI is never going to be copyrighted by the AI companies. In light of this uncertainty I don’t understand why they don’t require AI code to be flagged as such. That bit seems like a really bad idea, legally speaking.
i’m actually a little surprised, given their history about being so hardcore about dfsg compliance.
There is no such thing as “responsible use of GenAI”. That said, I understand the decision in the face of even Linus Torvalds allowing AI-generated code into the kernel. If Debian would have banned AI code entirely they would have had to fork every single thing they include in their distro, wipe the AI code from it, and then work to develop it further themselves. It would be too gargantuan a task.
There is. Local models trained only on clearly copy left licensed data.
But this isn’t that. This is very irresponsible
None of the proposals would have banned AI usage in upstream projects, but banning AI usage in the context of the Debian project was on the table
This email from 2016 by jwz springs to mind.
I guess you want Debian to be the kind of operation that uses the work of others while blatantly and explicitly ignoring the wishes of the person who did the actual creative work.
I am increasingly of the opinion that all software developers and adjacent people are fucking scum unless proven otherwise.
as a dev I second this opinion.
I was surprised by how many were Trump supporters.
then I was surprised at how many were anti-vax.
now I’m not even surprised.
Oh no, the people creating free shit for you to use that’s not monetized in any way, want to reduce their workloads. Scum!
You mean the work that that nobody is forcing them to do? The one they do by their own choice while not asking consent and respecting the wishes of others? Yep those devs sound pretty fucking scummy to me.
boooo
I love Debian. An ol’ rock ballad from the 90s
Dammit. Need to find a new OS.
Linus Torvalds has stated a similar policy for the Linux kernel. If you’re really serious about avoiding the power loom, you have to change the kernel too.
If you want to avoid ai assisted code your only chance is to build a new OS with a new kernel yourself.
Not necessarily. No one says you can’t just use the latest commit to the Linux kernel (or any other software) before it became slopified.
True. I’m really not happy with the avalanche of dogshit produced by “AI” though. Maybe I need to find a new hobby.
Good thing I don’t use debian.
AI may be the one thing in life I find hard to boycott lmao.
This is like saying “Responsible use of highly infectious diseases.”
That’s a very apt analogy
Unfortunately, they’re not taking nearly the amount of caution needed. So this is like experimenting with highly infections diseases in a middle school bio lab with no one wearing ppe
It’s almost certainly going to go wrong. And once it does, you can’t undo it
Like… In research for vaccines?
Ohh you mean like the prize winning Folding project that google just shut down so that they could reassign all the staff to work on Gemini instead?
The project that reached its goals and is the basis for new projects? Yeah
Lmfao
This bro doesn’t understand AI, protein folding, or code at all but speaks as an authority on it all.
Their model for folding proteins worked, is complete and access is given freely to researchers for use. I’m not sure what you think they should be working on now, are the people who made it supposed to just never move on to new projects?
Notice how they’ve provided access to 200 million protein predictions in the human proteome and various plants?
Does that sound like it has completed prediction for proteomes of all life on earth?
Does it ever say it is complete even if only for humans?
Does it ever say the workers on the project had verified the validity of even a fraction of the predictions or discovered application of the findings?
It wasn’t “finished”, it was shut down and the employees reassigned to work on a project that produvesw nothing but worthless slop images and texts, buggy code, and occasionally deletes a database.
Great example. It’s good for that, it must be good universally, so let’s use it for everything. Let’s force people to use it for everything, because it has one legitimate and specific use case scenario.
Yeah, let’s use infectious diseases for socialising with people.
Cough on the face of the person you want to say hello to… Wait… People already do that.
for fuck sakes; stop pretending the csam generating machine is useful.
Just because you could not find a use for it, does not mean millions of other people have not.
Just like any technology. you can use it responsibly or irresponsibly.
There is no way (in this world that we have created) to use AI “responsibly”. No matter what you choose, you are building on the base of wage theft, human suffering, environmental destruction and empowerment of the oligarchies.
AI is not “like any other technology”. That’s techbro acceleracionist slopaganda.
Would you say the same of electricity? There is no way to use it responsibly because its all based on exploitative resource extraction?
Please, try at least some modicum of intellectual discourse. Electricity is quite a physical phenomenon of nature, like rain, we can not impart moral judgment on them.
All that said, there are ways to use electricity without “exploitative resource extraction”, for example with a potato.
You need to divorce your thinking of AI as a current prominent manifestation of the capitalistic black hole and the technology itself. Before that is was Crypto. Before that it was cloud, before that it was property derivatives. Capitalism will just hijack anything where they can extract value from the quickest.
AI as a technology is very much real and very much physical, it follows the same physical rules that everything else is. Denying that is like saying steam power is not real because you can’t see the force pushing.
AI has been around for 50 years now. Its driven much of engineering progress in the 70s and 80s, our chemical and biological research in the 90s and physics in the 2000s.
The current large language learning models are just a next progression of this technological trend.
Remember absolutism is toxic.
AI has been around for 50 years now.
I really don’t care.
This is so divorced from the current discussion of what AI is doing now that it’s a waste of time even talking about it.
You need to divorce your thinking
I already did, but you refuse to read it. I explicitly said this is about how A (or what people call “AI”, because it certainly has not existed for “around for 50 years now”) exist in this world how we have created it. Via theft, exploitation and destruction, and oriented to the fulfillment of the elites and the oppression of the worker class.
Absolutism is toxic, yes. Moderated realism upon a flagrant observation of reality as conducted, is not.
No matter what you choose, you are building on the base of wage theft, human suffering, environmental destruction and empowerment of the oligarchies
so… like… any other technology after all then?.. otherwise I highly suggest you throw away your phone, your store-bought clothes, most of what you own, really.
Oh look it’s the same accelerationist argument as usual, that just because you loathe one technology you must throw away all of them.
Try at least high-school grade of discussion.
Try at least high-school grade of discussion.
Agreed, you really should take that advice to heart! I mean, I get it, it’s fun to hate the new thing with everyone else and virtue signal as hard as you can, as long as you don’t try to apply the same level of vigor to literally any other part of your life. This is The Bad Thing and you are The Good One because you hate The Bad Thing. Time to tell everyone
No, not really. There are models based on freely given training data. There are models used without wasting large amounts of electricity. There are models that aren’t used to empower the oligarchs.
It sounds like you are mad at our economic and societal structures, but taking your anger out on the tools.
It sounds like you are mad at our economic and societal structures, but taking your anger out on the tools.
I can be mad at both the exploitative structures and at the toolkits that enable, further and synthetize them. They don’t need to be mutually exclusive, and in general it’s not useful that they are.
So are you mad at power-tools? The internet? Cars? Because they are “building on the base of wage theft, human suffering, environmental destruction and empowerment of the oligarchies.”
Why are you mad at one set of tools, but not the other sets of tools?
Not really. What, you expect me to be mad at the wheelbarrow?
Geez, the low meda literacy and the silly arguments of absurdum from the people who try everything to sell a cage for which they don’t have the keys is unprecedented.
Then why are you mad at AI? Those fit all of the same requrirements that you listed above. Why do you think one is bad, but not the other?
if people are finding use for a csam generating machine, i hope they get a visit from the fbi
I take it you think the only use for a microwave is to cook babies?
Imagine calling AI “the csam generating machine” but not cameras.
No, you’re right, those Meta glasses are also powerful csam-generating machines.
