Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs

I also find the reference to the energy consumption of AI dated a year and a half ago to be extremely unconvincing. The efficiency gains in AI over the course of the last year have probably been unparalleled in any other era of computing. The model (Qwen 3.8 27b) that I run on my own hardware on a single, high end gaming GPU, is often compared to the state of the art, massive frontier model from the beginning of this year. There was literally no amount of money you could pay to any company to run the biggest, most energy hungry AI model in existence at the time that the reference was written, that would even compare to the quality you can get out of a single GPU now.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/

[2] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Sustainable-creativity-post-cop...

> - original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies

and

> Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy.

So from what I understand it is OK to use AI for security reviews privately but is not cool to host a project that allows to do that?

Also, what does it mean "and so on"? Like "anything we consider we don't allow at some point?"

I will add that the policy is not just dumb and unenforceable, it is also poorly reasoned. Many of the arguments apply equally to other technologies, or don't apply to AI-generated code in the first place.

If resource usage/hardware costs are a concern, should games and databases be banned? If financial ethics are a concern, should SaaS services/apps with micro-transactions be banned? If ownership is a concern, should closed-source software or private repos be banned? And so on.

I think it is obvious that this choice, much like the crypto/blockchain choice, was made purely because of the "vibes" (if you will) around AI, and not for any logical reason.

As much as I like paying to escape a capitalistic monstrosity such as github, they still seem to be more … mentally stable, for the lack of a better term. At least you are not at a whim of some BDFL or an aggressive minority of radicals. It is quite sad, that we have a choice of enshittifaction and radicalization only, with nothing in between just providing good service to paying customers.