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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"

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that this same debate raged when writing became a thing. Many viewed it with suspicious, or derision, as memorization was the big intellectual thing. So writing and reading back to remember was terrible. It's true it was a dependence, but the value was too high. With reading and writing a person could work on and synthesize from a far wider range of concurrent materials than one could with just…

Big difference though, once you know how to read and write, nobody can take that away from you.

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We are talking about Debian, a free software that cares a lot about the licensing of its packages. The licensing and authorship is an essential element of the project

Yes, because they want to avoid trade secret lawsuits is what I understand? Computer generated output including code is in the public domain according to the us copyright office, so licensing and authorship are only relevant due to trade secrets is what I understand

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big difference though, once you know how to read and write, nobody can take that away from you.

Nobody can take local models away from you, either

Yea, that's sorta my point. We're not, or at least I'm not to the point I have a local model as good as Opus yet though.

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

#235
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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> ngl this is just gatekeeping

As a beneficiary of Debian, this is good, you are praising Debian with feint damnation. I wish Debian had done more gatekeeping in the past on specific components.

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

#236

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.

Yep. This is my policy. Use whatever tools however they serve you, the standards do not change.

If someone makes a sloppy 100,000 line PR in a day the problem is not whether it was generated by Claude or frantically written using VIM and a mechanical keyboard.

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

#237
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stopped them before?

Before they were not able to spam large PRs

Why not? I'm pretty sure a developer could spam large PRs before and regardless of AI involvement is allowed or not.

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

#238
People have to realise that AI is here to stay.

Being a full time AI hater is counterproductive.

Commercial vendors with full time employees are leveraging for maximum benefits, why would a project depending on volunteers resist? Not forgetting it's shortcomings

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

#239
post #43

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.

A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.

Terminates???

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

#240
post #128
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for all, but many mature open source communities have explicit or ad-hoc reputation schemes that are used to triage contributions. A fresh account means starting over with zero reputation, which in turn means your contributions wait at the back of the line.

ability to create low effort PR means that they can reset the reputation as much as they can..

There are no anonymous debian developers. All have been vetted by multiple people.
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