Posting this because I want people to vote -- and ideally vote for a total ban.
> Posting this because I want people to vote
Irrelevant to post it here then with your reasons because it only concerns Debian developers
Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and ideally vote for a total ban. If a total ban were to happen, wouldn't that make Debian a target for hackers who can use LLMs to find vulnerabilities? How would Debian keep up with the influx of AI assisted 0 days?
Exactly, agreed 100% https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_the_land_of_the_blind,_the...
H. G. Wells wrote about how this proverb has limitations [1].
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#13Ban.
The options range from is A to H. It's not yes or no.
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not using AI to write production code doesn't mean you can't use AI proactively to find vulnerabilities.
Poster wants a "total ban", you can only deduce that means vulnerability management also.
Or you could read the proposal and deduce nothing.
It explicitly excludes security fixes.
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#15> Debian is a large and complicated project: the release announcement for version 13 says it has 69,830 packages, which take a total of 403 GB of disk, and contain 1,463,291,186 lines of code. So, suitably, it is a large and complex poll. Surely these are not just Debian-owned packages. Whatever Debian decides won’t apply to packages not owned by Debian
Debian is huge - that's why so many other distros use it as a base! So, yes, all those packages are maintained either by an individual Debian Developer or a team of them. There are third party repos, but they're (currently) neither as widespread nor as commonly-used as those for other major distros. This vote won't affect them, and you might potentially expect to see their use grow if one of the harsher options in th…
The point though, is that they package 3rd party applications and libraries.
If they ban AI, they won't stop packaging apps and libraries from parties that do use AI. They wouldn't even know who does or doesn't.
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#16Crazy how divided AI is here on HN…
We’re almost to the point where the average non-technical person uses AI daily (just like phones and the internet were once only used by the technocrats) without blinking, it will be ubiquitous and universal in adoption, yet comments here on HN from people that have the vantage point of seeing AND understanding how AI works, and who can also predict the inevitable integration of AI in society, have got their collective heads in the sand to the point they’re soon going to sound like conspiracy theorists.
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#17Kind of arbitrary since it doesn't impact their upstreams.
The very first thing I used GenAI for was fixing build and CI pipeline issues, exactly the drudgery no one cares about. Today, LLMs are excellent at the yeoman's work of maintaining patches across multiple versions and upstream, which is what I imagine a lot of Debian devs do.
Why you wouldn't want to hand that off to a computer program is beyond me.
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#18> If Proposal H has a weakness, it's that it does not distinguish between local and cloud-based LLMs
Is the energy usage so different between local and cloud inference? Both require electricity, the local option even more than the better optimized cloud variant even perhaps. How either is powered makes the crucial difference I suppose. Both can potentially run on solar as well as gas or nuclear.
It's the training that takes the most energy, and that needs to happen for locally running or cloud models regardless.
What am I missing here? EDIT:
Proposal H mentions "LLM usage accelerates the destruction of our ecosystem"
I was thinking solely about energy usage, but there is of course also water usage. A local setup is not water-evaporator cooled most likely.
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#19Posting this because I want people to vote -- and ideally vote for a total ban.
> Posting this because I want people to vote Irrelevant to post it here then with your reasons because it only concerns Debian developers
I wrote it. I am fully aware of that, and I said so in the piece.
I want to spread awareness that it's happening -- it only has a couple of days to run.
So far there are only ~350 votes:
https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_llm/
Circa 270 people have voted:
https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_llm/tally.txt
(My reckoning; could well be wrong!)
With a project the size of Debian, I feel sure that is a tiny fraction of eligible developers.
Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
#20I do use and run my own LLMs locally. But I understand why Debian might ban it, under just 1 reason:
LLM outputs cannot be copyrighted.
That alone starts to invalidate the GPL and other FLOSS licenses. It overall weakens the project the more you accept. And companies (MS, Amazon, etm) will gleefully loot anything marked with "LLM" as a free-for-all.
Until the whole copyright situation can be finalized, I'd understand for any FLOSS org to refuse all LLM code.
(Its also the same reason why Oracle also forbids all LLM code in Java and their DB. Same reason.)