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LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

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Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

#51

Post by aspensmonster »

simonw wrote: post #39
smellf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how they can reconcile the stricter proposals with the LLM usage in kernel development. That seems totally untenable. I mean it all seems untenable, but with the kernel especially. Also, what about when you inevitably get a situation where a critical vulnerability is discovered, and the only patch available is LLM generated? Do they have to wait to patch until some person who hasn't seen the LLM-generated pa…

Kernel development is excluded from this, because it's covered by "Upstream projects using LLMs for development". On security, I worry that proposal A's "forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models", as written, excludes contributions where the LLM assisted in discovering the vulnerability. That's clearly a bad policy, and they should update their wording to clarify…

Isn't basically every package in Debian an upstream project?

Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

#52

Post by alightsoul »

Barrin92 wrote: post #47
alightsoul wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most documentation is not translated to spanish, for example. working on international projects is the exception, not the rule. Spanish speakers just use LLMs because searching on google in spanish yields no results, because the info they need is in english so google doesn't show it to spanish speakers or by searching it in spanish. Spanish speakers have their search result language set to spanish by default based on…

and they still can do this. Again nobody, by definition, can stop you from consuming documentation using machine translation, what you cannot do per these guidelines is contribute translations or documentation using an LLM or pretend you speak a language to contribute, and that is eminently reasonable. You will continue to be able to translate the English documentation into Spanish but they will understandably not pu…

It doesn't elminate the problems of AI translation, it just shifts it into users in global south countries and makes fixing them harder because there is no transparency in private by default AI chats to know which parts of the translation are wrong

Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

#53

Post by dang »

simonw wrote: post #18

Don't misinterpret this link as representing a final decision. It's actually three separate proposals which will be debated and then voted on. Proposal A is "expressly forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools." Proposal B is "The Debian project allows AI-assisted contributions (partially or fully generated by an LLM), provided t…

Thanks, we've put the three proposals bit in the title above.

Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

#56

Post by zzo38computer »

I might su combining Proposal A (but only for contributions (to Debian) that actually involve the output of LLMs/generative-AI or that blindly trust their results) with Proposal C (for everything else).

However, in the case of item 4 of Proposal C, there are multiple kind of "assistance" that is possible; not all of them involve contributing the output of LLMs (e.g. the assistance might be to check for a mistake such as if a paragraph seems to be redundant or is incomplete or something like that; the result from the LLM might be incorrect but you will have to decide by yourself what (if anything) to do about it when writing your message). Even if some kind of assistance should not be banned entirely, it should still be discouraged (like the rest of Proposal C says). (Also, there are other programs that can sometimes be used for the assistance; e.g. sometimes ordinary spelling/grammar checking will do (although that won't find that an incorrect word that is spelled like a correct word in the correct grammar).)

I do not use LLM/generative-AI for any purpose, and would not accept contributions including their output into my projects, and would discourage other uses. (This seems to be similar to Proposal A and Proposal C.)

Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

#57

Post by simonw »

aspensmonster wrote: post #51
simonw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel development is excluded from this, because it's covered by "Upstream projects using LLMs for development". On security, I worry that proposal A's "forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models", as written, excludes contributions where the LLM assisted in discovering the vulnerability. That's clearly a bad policy, and they should update their wording to clarify…

Isn't basically every package in Debian an upstream project?

They're talking about the software that is unique to Debian, like their lintian tool. https://wiki.debian.org/Lintian

Re: LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

#58

Post by runarberg »

hkalbasi wrote: post #13

> A LLM (...) merely produces syntactically likely combinations of the training data While doesn't matter much in the rest of the policy, this is a common misconception among AI skeptics. It is not the case for a long time (since RL is used heavily in the training) and a LLM may go beyond its training data.

I assume RL stands for reinforcement learning, which just means that the weights are adjusted by evaluating some loss function. If the loss function uses the training data (i.e. supervised learning) then the original assumption still holds. So I fail to see how this is a misconception.
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