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Gentoo AI Policy

wiki.gentoo.org

31–40 of 206 posts

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#31
post #18

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.

The whole argument smacks of bad faith "yet you participate in society" arguments.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#32
> Ethical concerns. The business side of AI boom is creating serious ethical concerns. Among them: Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.

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.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#33
Posted April 2024. I wonder how they feel about this now. Or will next year. Claude Code wouldn’t exist for another year when this was posted. Nevermind Codex. It’s already awkward. Within 12 months it will be cringeworthy.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#34

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…

I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#36

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…

I use it on some systems so strong that most emerges hardly take much longer than a binary package install. It's pretty nice there.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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But it's also difficult to prove it correct by argument or evidence. "Refute" is typically used in a context that suggests that the thing we're refuting has a strong likelihood of being true. This is only difficult to prove incorrect because it's a summary of the author's opinion.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#39
post #34

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…

I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.

Because it is ideologically motivated.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#40
post #29
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly --- while I doubt it would make a difference to the decision Gentoo in particular would make --- the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this, when the first iteration of foundation models tuned for effective agents came out. People forget that effective coding agents are just a couple minutes old; the first research preview release of Claude Code was this past Febr…

> the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this People say this every month.

Do they? I'm referring to something specific. While I happen to think LLM coding agents are pretty great, my point didn't depend on you thinking that, only on a recognition of the fact that the capabilities of these systems sharply changed very shortly after they published this --- in a very specific, noticeable way.
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