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Gentoo AI Policy

wiki.gentoo.org

91–100 of 206 posts

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#91
post #47

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…

I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. 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…

[flagged]

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#92

This might get me in trouble, but with all the negativity I’m seeing here I’ve got to ask. Why do you care? Their sandbox their rules, and if you care because you want to contribute you’re still free to do so. Unless you’re an LLM I guess, but the rest of us should have no problem. The negativity just seems overblown. More power to them, and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it.

Not speaking for everyone but to me the problem is the normalization of bad behavior.

Some people in this thread are already interpreting that policies that allow contributions of AI-generated code means it's OK to not understand the code they write and can offload that work to the reviewers.

If you have ever had to review code that an author doesn't understand or written code that you don't understand for others to review, you should know how bad it is even without an LLM.

> Why do you care? Their sandbox their rules...

* What if it's a piece of software or dependency that I use and support? That affects me.

* What if I have to work with these people in these community? That affects me.

* What if I happen to have to mentor new software engineers who were conditioned to think that bad practices are OK? That affects me.

Things are usually less sandboxed than you think.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#93

Every time I encounter these kinds of policy, I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced: The people who are considerate enough to abide by these policies, are the ones who would have "cared" about the code qualities and stuff like that, so the policy is a moot point for these kinds of people. OTOH, the people who recklessly spam "contributions" generated from LLMs, by their very nature, would not r…

> I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced

One of the parties that decided on Gentoo's policy effectively said the same thing. If I get what you're really asking... the reality is, there's no way for them to know if a LLM tool was used internally, it's honor system. But I mean enforcement is just ban the contributor if they become a problem. They've banned or otherwise restricted other ones for being disruptive or spamming low quality contributions in the past.

It's worded the way it is because most of the parties understand this isn't going away and might get revisited eventually. At least one of them hardline opposes LLM contributions in any form and probably won't change their mind.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#94

Every time I encounter these kinds of policy, I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced: The people who are considerate enough to abide by these policies, are the ones who would have "cared" about the code qualities and stuff like that, so the policy is a moot point for these kinds of people. OTOH, the people who recklessly spam "contributions" generated from LLMs, by their very nature, would not r…

I think it's a discouragement more than an enforcement --- a "we will know if you submit AI-generated code, so don't bother trying." Maybe those who do know how to use LLMs really well can submit code that they fully understand and can explain the reasoning of, in which case the point is moot.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#97
I would say the question is, do you iterate on the output or not?

My perspective is that this criticism is only valid for “single-shot in spirit” / “prompt and forget” LLM powered contributions.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were not talking about LLMs being participants of anything, but people who are against LLMs in whatever capacity. Surely people can be participants of a movement.

>> All I can say to this is that my position is Large Language Models (LLM's) are a combination of algorithms and data. >> As as such, for me they do not qualify as anything to be either "pro" or "anti", let alone a participant of an activist movement. > They were not talking about LLMs being participants of anything ... Clearly I was referencing LLM's being something to foment "an activist movement" in an attempt to…

> in an attempt to de-escalate the implication of there being some kind of "anti-LLM activist movement."

Are you trying to imply that there isn't an anti-LLM activist movement? There certainly is

you can just google it

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anti%20llm%20activist%...

a subreddit dedicated to the anti-AI movement

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/

"what is the goal of the so-called anti-ai movement"

https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1mn3hh8/what_is_the...

"how do we build an anti-ai movement"

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistHate/comments/1hk3wuj/how_do_...

"The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down

Activists are organizing to combat generative AI and other technologies—and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/02/new-l...

"Anti-AI Explained: Why Resistance to Artificial Intelligence Is Growing

As AI tools become more advanced, a growing chorus of critics is raising alarms about job loss, misinformation and other societal risks. Learn what’s fueling the anti-AI movement."

https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/anti-ai

"together against AI"

https://togetheragainstai.com/

and on and on

I invite people to become familiar with the movement and their arguments and compare them to the Gentoo rationale.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#99
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

for further reading:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#100
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix is another route as far as a compile-from-source package manager with lots of options on many packages.

I feel like most Gentoo folks probably moved over to Nix/NixOS. The security argument for recompiling from source is addressed by the input addressed (sic) package cache. The customization aspect is mostly covered by Nix package overrides and overlays. You can also setup your own package cache.

I haven't. The Nix language makes no sense to me and there is still nothing akin to useflags. I don't want to override a bunch of packages just to make my system not pull in (e.g.) UI libraries.
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