Joey Hess is unimpressed. See https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Debian_and_the_sirens/
[flagged]
Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
51–60 of 476 posts
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#52[flagged]
This is HN you will be voted to death by the local for talking against the AI or the last tech invention.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#53And so it begins. I don't believe they had a choice though, sticking to hand written code would be backwards and eventually meaningless as people would just submit generated code as "handwritten", the coding models are quickly becoming capable enough for this. I wonder what it means copyright wise though. To what degree is the code even copyrightable if it's entirely generated, even if you review and provide feedback…
My predictions for genAI code in F/OSS projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613
1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.
2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#54[flagged]
Doing the opposite (disallowing AI), will place it on a path of getting riddled with security issues.
When attackers are using AI to both find vulnerabilities and build exploits faster than Debian can figure out how to patch the project without AI, you are saying Debian should not move quicker to fix these issues?
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#55And so it begins. I don't believe they had a choice though, sticking to hand written code would be backwards and eventually meaningless as people would just submit generated code as "handwritten", the coding models are quickly becoming capable enough for this. I wonder what it means copyright wise though. To what degree is the code even copyrightable if it's entirely generated, even if you review and provide feedback…
I think most communities tackling this issue, or at least the open source ones, work on a honour basis for determining if a project is LLM based or not.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#56New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
> it's still your code
I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation.
So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#57New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#58New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
This is the way it should've always been. I don't care what tool you use, but you'd better be ready to stand by and explain the results if necessary.
Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?
We've come to the same conclusion in our organization and while it felt like it needed to be discussed and stated, I've never heard of anyone coming to a different conclusion.
[EDIT: I was referring specifically to the idea that you have to stand by the code that you write. Is anyone deciding on a policy that says "the AI did it" is a valid excuse for breaking code?]
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.