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Gentoo AI Policy

wiki.gentoo.org

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Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#12

Post by AdieuToLogic »

perching_aix wrote: post #7
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #6

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: 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…

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Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#14

Post by hjdjeiejd »

This is on-brand.

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.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#16

Post by danpalmer »

This is a prime example of poor AI policy. It doesn't define what AI is – is using Google translate in order to engage on their mailing lists allowed? Is using Intellisense-like tools that we've had for decades allowed? The rationale is also poor, citing concerns that can be applied far more widely than just LLMs. The ethical concerns are pretty hand-wavy, I'm pretty sure email is used to empower spam and yet I suspect Gentoo have no problem using email.

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.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#17

Post by Spivak »

danpalmer wrote: post #16

This is a prime example of poor AI policy. It doesn't define what AI is – is using Google translate in order to engage on their mailing lists allowed? Is using Intellisense-like tools that we've had for decades allowed? The rationale is also poor, citing concerns that can be applied far more widely than just LLMs. The ethical concerns are pretty hand-wavy, I'm pretty sure email is used to empower spam and yet I suspe…

Or because this is a policy by and for human adults who all understand what we're talking about you just don't accept contributions from anyone obviously rule-lawyering in bad faith.

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.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#18

Post by dmead »

danpalmer wrote: post #16

This is a prime example of poor AI policy. It doesn't define what AI is – is using Google translate in order to engage on their mailing lists allowed? Is using Intellisense-like tools that we've had for decades allowed? The rationale is also poor, citing concerns that can be applied far more widely than just LLMs. The ethical concerns are pretty hand-wavy, I'm pretty sure email is used to empower spam and yet I suspe…

> It doesn't define what AI is

this is a bad faith comment.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#19

Post by atrettel »

hjdjeiejd wrote: post #14

This is on-brand. 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 e…

At least when I used Gentoo, the point of compiling from source was more about customization than security. I remember having to set so many different options. It was quite granular. Now I just compile certain things from scratch and modify them as needed rather than having an entire system like Gentoo do that, but I do see the appeal to some people.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#20

Post by bombcar »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #9
logicprog wrote: post #4

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't: > 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…

>> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. > 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. 0 - https://opensource.org/licenses

Some of the ideas behind the GPL could be anti-copyright, insofar as the concept they’d love to see is software being uncopyrightable.
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