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Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

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Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#151

Post by alightsoul »

dgellow wrote: post #141
chuckadams wrote: post #6

New 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.

From my layman understanding, the ownership of LLM generated code isn’t yet clarified. It could be that the person who prompted owns it, but it could also be nobody owns it, and we don’t yet have a legal ruling to rely upon, no?

To a company ownership is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether it contains trade secrets and that is often only proven if an employee worked at their company before

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#152

Post by chrisjj »

GZGavinZhao wrote: post #110

Related: I find this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful, both professionally and personally, to communicate the level of AI assistance so that the person on the receiving end can evaluate how much time & effort they want to spend understanding my code. [1]: https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-leve...

> this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful

Why would you trust the bot to self-assess truthfully?

That's like trusting a spammer to tag his emails as spam.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#153

Post by trelbutate »

fidotron wrote: post #103
Sharlin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You find it scary that people enjoy what they do? Simply caring about the end result is often not wise, ethical, or sustainable, and the quality thereof is dubious in any case, especially when you consider that the end result of developing software is never just the artifact.

Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy. And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site. This is quite distinct from enjoyment.

People who simply enjoy coding (without treating it to be "therapeutic") are still unhappy because working with LLMs is just not the same, and not rewarding in the same way

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#154

Post by ls612 »

jayofdoom wrote: post #134
qsera wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops them from submitting PRs from another account?

Nothing. And that's the problem -- the issue isn't "should a contributor be able to use AI" it's quickly becoming "is this entire contributor an AI agent". Every actual-human who gets a bad first experience hurts the project. The contributors having to be suspicious of new people hurts the project. The whole thing just sucks, and I don't know how to fix it. I use claude-code, but the AI ecosystem and some of the auto…

[flagged]

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#155

Post by dgellow »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #149
dgellow wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my layman understanding, the ownership of LLM generated code isn’t yet clarified. It could be that the person who prompted owns it, but it could also be nobody owns it, and we don’t yet have a legal ruling to rely upon, no?

I don't see why an open source project would care one way or the other? If the prompter owns it then they are licensing it by submitting it to the project. If no one owns it then there is no problem.

We don’t know yet because that’s an unresolved matter. The question of ownership is currently undefined as far as I understand. It could be that after an actual legal decision the ownership doesn’t end up being one of those 2 cases, for whatever reasons the judge would decide

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#156

Post by bodge5000 »

dguest wrote: post #58
oooyay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As others have said there are other conclusions going both ways (though I do think most settle on as you said), though one very fair conclusion I came across is that it's not allowed because the whole issue of copyright is still somewhat unresolved, and though its fine right now, that could (probably wont, but could) massively backfire later.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#157

Post by rapind »

sodapopcan wrote: post #119
internet2000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions? Yes. Very notably: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

On the opposite side or the noteable spectrum, look up "Steve Yegge wants you to stop looking at your code." He said it in a video interview, though plenty of summaries online of exact wording and ideas. Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?

Extremes on both sides. I'd wager were moving in Yegge's direction though, like it or not.

> Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?

If you have a much test coverage as SQLite, I'd be tempted to trust it, and I think that's where we are headed. Someone still needs to define these guardrails though, so IMO the developers job is just mutating into something else, but is still necessary. Long term, who knows.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#158

Post by scotty79 »

sodapopcan wrote: post #119
internet2000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions? Yes. Very notably: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

On the opposite side or the noteable spectrum, look up "Steve Yegge wants you to stop looking at your code." He said it in a video interview, though plenty of summaries online of exact wording and ideas. Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?

> Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?

Works for ToS and software and media licenses. Allegedly.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#159

Post by matheusmoreira »

> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.

A quality based filter. Excellent.

> The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit.

Absolutely.

Thanks, Debian!

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#160

Post by dgellow »

swingandamiss wrote: post #131

Good. AI is a game changer. It's like having an expert sitting next to you at all times. It's understandable why all these experts who want to gatekeep don't like AI, but ultimately, AI will win out, it's just too good.

If you’re dismissing the opposition as gatekeepers you clearly don’t understand their positions
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