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Gentoo AI Policy

wiki.gentoo.org

171–180 of 206 posts

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it. how would they know? - this is (one of) the ways for people to let them know

Let's stop bullshitting, nobody here is going to contribute to Gentoo and is now put off because of this policy change. What we're looking at is mostly JavaScript monkeys who feel personally offended because they're unable to differentiate criticism of their tools from criticism of their own personal character. The outrage is purely theoretical.

As a JavaScript monkey I believe you have a point, and this was the core of my original question.

How many contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Probably none.

How many potential contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Maybe dozens?

I'll be amazed if this has any notable negative outcomes for Gentoo and their contributions.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the kind of thing you'd want from a distro. Would you be happy if your doctor just started giving you new drugs because they're "new technology"? Or would you prefer it to go through rigorous rounds of testing and evaluation to figure out the potential problems?

I certainly hope my medical team is using AI tools, as they have been repeatedly demonstrated to be more accurate than doctors. Only downside is my last psychiatrist dropped me as a patient when he left his practice to start an AI company providing regulatory compliance for, essentially, Dr. ChatGPT.

Honestly it just sounds like you've been sold on "AI" being a thing and don't have any idea how any of it works. I don't even know what you're referring to with "more accurate than doctors". Classifying scans or something? Do you realise how different that is to generative LLMs writing code etc? Scan classification may well have been shown to be more accurate, but generative LLMs have never been shown to be "better" than humans and in fact it's easy to demonstrate they are much, much worse in many ways.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exciting. Thank for for raising the point. I've posted https://discourse.llvm.org/t/our-ai-policy-vs-code-of-conduc... to see what other people think of this. Thank you for your commit, and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code that you don't understand in the review, as it makes my point rather more forcefully than otherwise.

graceful... > and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970#issuecommen... irony really is dead

Only bothering to mention it in response to one of many review comments is nearly the same as not disclosing it.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#174

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to…

There are a number of other issues such the ethical and environmental ones. However, this one in isolation... Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough I'm struggling to understand this particular angle. Humans are capable of generating extremely poor code. Improperly supervised LLMs are capable of ge…

[deleted]

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly hope my medical team is using AI tools, as they have been repeatedly demonstrated to be more accurate than doctors. Only downside is my last psychiatrist dropped me as a patient when he left his practice to start an AI company providing regulatory compliance for, essentially, Dr. ChatGPT.

Honestly it just sounds like you've been sold on "AI" being a thing and don't have any idea how any of it works. I don't even know what you're referring to with "more accurate than doctors". Classifying scans or something? Do you realise how different that is to generative LLMs writing code etc? Scan classification may well have been shown to be more accurate, but generative LLMs have never been shown to be "better"…

LLMs perform better than doctors in a randomized trial:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

And here: https://arxiv.org/html/2503.10486v1

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onboarding a new contributor implies you’re investing time into someone you’re confident will pay off over the long run as an asset to the project. Reviewing LLM slop doesn’t grant any of that, you’re just plugging thumbs into cracks in the glass until the slop-generating contributor gets bored and moves on to another project or feels like they got what they wanted, and then moves on to another project. I accept that…

>Onboarding a new contributor implies you’re investing time into someone you’re confident will pay off over the long run as an asset to the project. No you don't. And if you're that entitled to people's time you will simply get no new contributors.

Not getting thousand line AI slop PRs from resume builders who are looking for a "LLVM contributor" bullet point before moving on is a net positive. Lack of such contributors is a feature, not a bug.

And you can't go and turn this around into "but the gate keeping!" You just said that expecting someone to learn and be an asset to a project is entitlement, so by definition someone with this attitude won't stick around.

Lastly, the reason that the resume builder wants the "LLVM contributor" bullet point in the first place is precisely because that normally takes effort. If it becomes known in the industry that getting it simply requires throwing some AI PR over the wall - the value of this signal will quickly diminish.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#177

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't: > Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? > Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. This is massively overblown. If…

>I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? FOSS still has to exist within the rules of the system the planet operates under. You can't just say "I downloaded that movie, but I'm a Linux user so I don't believe in copyright" and get away with it >the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech produ…

> [citation needed]

Sure, here ya go:

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2024/08/18/is-ai-eating-all-th...

https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2024/09/09/is-ai-eating-all-th...

The first comprehensive environmental audit and analysis performed in conjunction with French environmental agencies and audit environmental audit consultants, which includes every stage of the supply chain, including usually hidden upstream costs: https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environ...

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/for-the-climate-little-thi...

> Disingenuous strawman. Tech CEO's and the like have been exuberant at the idea that "AI" will replace human labor. The entire end-goal of companies like OpenAI is to create a "super-intelligence" that will then generate a return. By definition the AI would be performing labor (services) for capital, outcompeting humans to do so

Isn't that literally the selling point of software, performing something that would otherwise have to be done by humans, namely both keeping calculating research, locating things, transferring information, and so on, using capital instead of labor, transforming labor into capital, and providing more profits as a result?

> Unless OpenAI wants it to just hack every bank account on Earth and transfer it all to them instead? Or something equally farcical

It's extremely funny that you pull this out of your house and say that this is the only way that I could be justified in saying what I'm saying, while accusing me of making a disingenuous straw man. Consult the rod in your own eye before you concern yourself with the speck in mind.

> >So did email.

> "We should improve society somewhat"

> "Ah, but you participate in society! Curious!"

Disengenuous strawman. That comic is used to respond to people that claim that you can't be against something if you also participate in it out of necessity. That's not what I'm doing. I would be fine with it if they blank it condemned all things that enable spam on a massive level, including email, social media, automated phone calls, mail, and so on, while still using those technologies because they have to to live in present society and get the word out. There are people who do that with rigorous intellectual consistency and have been since those things existed. My argument is by condemning one but not the other irrespective of whether they use them or not, they are being ethically inconsistent and it shows a double standard and a biased towards technologies that they're used to over technologies that they aren't. It shows a fundamental reactionary conservatism over an actually well thought through ethical position.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

graceful... > and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970#issuecommen... irony really is dead

Only bothering to mention it in response to one of many review comments is nearly the same as not disclosing it.

We might know the word "disclose" very different then. I'm amenable to taking issue with them not disclosing it up front, but then their guidelines - if the person above is to be believed - don't require it, and they did disclose it a few days after opening it. It was also not them responding to an allegation or anything, they disclosed it completely on their own terms. And that was two months ago.

I find that latter part particularly relevant, considering the hoopla is about AI bros being lazy dogs who can't be bothered to put in the hard work before attempting to contribute. Irony being then that the person above just took an intentionally cut short citation to paint the person in a somehow even more negative light than they'd have otherwise appeared in, while simultaneously not even bothering to review the conduct they're proposing to police to confirm it actually matches their knowingly uncharitable conjecture. Two wrongs not making a right or whatever.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#179

Every time I encounter these kinds of policy, I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced: The people who are considerate enough to abide by these policies, are the ones who would have "cared" about the code qualities and stuff like that, so the policy is a moot point for these kinds of people. OTOH, the people who recklessly spam "contributions" generated from LLMs, by their very nature, would not r…

You enforce them by pointing out the policy and closing the issue/patch request whenever you're concerned about the quality of the submission.

If it turns out to be incorrectly called out, well that sucks, but I submit that patches have been refused before LLMs came to be.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#180
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever contributed to a very large project like LLVM? I would say clearly not from the comment. There are pitfalls everywhere. It’s not so small that you can get everything in your head with only a reading. You need to actually engage with the code via contributions to understand it. 100+ comments is not an exceptional amount for early contributions. Anyway, LLVM is so complex I doubt you can actually vibcode…

> Have you ever contributed to a very large project like LLVM? Oh, I did. Here's one: https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-columnstore-e... > I would say clearly not from the comment. Of course, you are wrong. > It’s not so small that you can get everything in your head with only a reading. PSP/TSP recommends writing typical mistakes into a list and use it to self-review and to fix code before sending it in…

The personal dig was unwarranted. I apologise.

> So, after reading code, one should write down what made him amazed and find out why it is so - whether it is a custom of a project or a peculiarity of code just read.

Sorry but that’s delusional.

The amount of people actually able to meaningfully read code, somehow identify what was so incredible it should be analysed despite being unfamiliar with the code base, maintain a list of their own likely error and self review is so vanishingly low it might as well not exist.

If that’s the bare a potential new contributor has to cross, you will get exactly none.

I’m personally glade LLVM disagree with you.

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