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Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

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Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#171

Post by heavyset_go »

pixl97 wrote: post #142
johnnyanmac wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. I'd say that that is downplaying and misrepreting the issue. You even go so far to say >Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for maki…

> are worth the downside of collapsing society. At least in the US, society has been well on it's way to collapse before the LLM came out. "Fake news" is a great example of this. >It's a decision that your mindset is the only right one and anyone else is a opposing progress. So pretty much every religious group that's ever existed for any amount of time. Fundamentalism is totally unproblematic, right?

> At least in the US, society has been well on it's way to collapse before the LLM came out. "Fake news" is a great example of this.

IMO you can blame this on ML and the ability to microtarget[1] constituencies with propaganda that's been optimized, workshopped, focus grouped, etc to death.

Proto-AI got us there, LLMs are an accelerator in the same direction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtargeting

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#172

Post by shakna »

badsectoracula wrote: post #166
heavyset_go wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For projects, it's also a licensing issue. You don't own the copyright on AI generated code, no one does, so it can't be licensed.

This isn't an issue of "nobody can use this" but an "everyone can use this", i.e. projects can use AI generated code just fine and they own the copyright to any modifications they do to it. Think of it like random noise in an image editor: you do own the random pixels since they're generated by the computer, but you can still use them as part of making your art - you do not lose copyright to your art because you used…

Only if the generated text has no inherited copyright from the source data.

Which it might. And needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, under current copyright law.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#173

Post by pessimizer »

I don't understand a lot of the anti-LLM venom within this specific context. Debian doesn't have to worry about stealing GPL code, so the copyright argument is nearly nil. There's still the matter of attribution-ware, but Debian includes tons of attribution and I'm sure would happily include anyone who thinks their OSS might have been trained on.

So leaving that aside, it just seems to be the revulsion that programmers feel towards a lot of LLM slop and the aggravation of getting a lot of slop submissions? Something that seems to be universal in the FOSS social environment, but also seems to be indicative of a boundary issue for me:

The fact that machines have started to write reasonable code doesn't mean that you don't have any responsibility to read or review it before you hand it to someone. You could always write shit code and submit it without debugging it or refactoring it sanely, etc. Projects have always had to deal with this, and I suspect they've dealt with this through limiting the people they talk to to their friends, putting arbitrary barriers in front of people who want to contribute, and just being bitchy. While they were doing this, non-corporate FOSS was stagnating and dying because 1) no one would put up with that without being paid, and/or 2) money could buy your way past barriers and bitchiness.

Projects need to groom contributors, not simply pre-filter contributions by identity in order to cut down on their workload. There has to be an onboarding process, and that onboarding process has to include banning and condemning people that give you unreviewed slop, and spreading their names and accounts to other projects that could be targeted. Zero tolerance for people who send you something to read that they didn't bother to read. If somebody is getting AI to work for them, then trust grows in that person, and their contributions should be valued.

I think the AI part is a distraction. AI is better for Debian that almost anyone else, because Debian is copyleft and avoids the problems that copyleft poses for other software. The problem is that people working within Free Software need some sort of structured social/code interaction where there are reputations to be gained and lost that aren't isolated to single interactions over pull requests, or trying to figure out how and where to submit patches. Where all of the information is in one place about how to contribute, and also about who is contributing.

Priority needs to be placed on making all of this stuff clear. Debian is a massive enough project, basically all-encompassing, where it could actually set up something like this for itself and the rest of FOSS could attach itself later. Why doesn't Debian have a "github" that mirrors all of the software it distributes? Aren't they the perfect place? One of the only good, functional examples of online government?

edit: There's no reason that Debian shouldn't be giving attribution to every online FOSS project that could possibly be run on Linux (it will be run on Debian, and hopefully distributed through apt-get.) Maybe a Debian contributor slash FOSS-in-general social network is the way to do that? Isn't debian.org almost that already?

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#174

Post by pessimizer »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #151

LLM-generated code is incompatible with libre software. It's extremely frustrating to see such a lack of conviction to argue this point forcefully and repeatedly. It's certainly bad enough to see such a widespread embrace of this dangerous and anti-libre technology within proprietary software teams, but when it comes to FLOSS, it should be a no-brainer to formalize an emphatic anti-slop contributor policy.

> It's extremely frustrating to see such a lack of conviction to argue this point forcefully and repeatedly.

It is. You haven't argued it at all, right here. You just asserted it as if it were self-evident, talked about your feelings, then demanded policy.

Your only job here was to convince people to align with you, and you didn't bother. It makes me suspect that you haven't really solidified the argument in your own mind.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#175

Post by [deleted] »

mholm wrote: post #149
oceanplexian wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer. This is one of those areas where you might have been right.. 4-6 months ago. But if you're paying attention, the floor has moved up substantially. For the work I do, last year the models would occasionally produce code with bugs, linter errors, etc, now the frontier models produce mostly flawl…

This very much depends on the domain you work in. Small projects in well tread domains are incredible for AI. SaaS projects can essentially be one-shot. But large projects, projects with specific standards or idioms, projects with particular versions of languages, performance concerns, hardware concerns, all things the Debian project has to deal with, aren't 'solved' in the same way.

[deleted]

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#176

Post by gorgoiler »

Does Debian have a rule that forbids (or a taboo that proscribes) contributors passing off other people’s work as their own? I could believe that such a rule is implied rather than written down. The GR could be about writing it down, and it would surely cover the case of code that came directly from a model. Even if we don’t consider a model to be another person it is certainly not the contributor’s own work.

(If anything, the copyright to model-generated code cannot possibly be said to belong to the human contributor. They… didn’t write it! I’m glad to see that aspect was discussed though I’m surprised it wasn’t the main thrust.)

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#177

Post by kbelder »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #115
mr-wendel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. I do agree that at large, the theoretical upsides of accessibility are almost certainly completely overshadowed by obvious downsides of AI. At least, for now anyway. Accessibility is a single instance of the general argument that "of course there are major upsides to using AI", and there a good chance the future onl…

> I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. I'd say that that is downplaying and misrepreting the issue. You even go so far to say >Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for maki…

>You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society.

No, literally, he didn't.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#178

Post by pixl97 »

sigbottle wrote: post #47
lpcvoid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You're a human, who went through real life experiences. You learned, developed as a human being. You made mistakes and grew from them. You did what you have to do to advance. What you output has intrinsic value because of all this. I argue that even when you roll your face on your keyboard, the output is more valuable than ten pages of slop output from an LLM, since it's human, with all the history, experience, e…

I don't know why this got downvoted. I've already been so frustrated by HN LIDAR mindsets but holy shit. Human society exists because we value humans, full stop. The easiest way to "solve" all of humanity's problems is to simply say that humans aren't valuable. Sometimes it feels like we're conceding a ridiculous amount of ground on that basic principle every year - one more human value gone because it "doesn't matte…

>Human society exists because we value humans, full stop.

Eh, human society exists because it is an emergent behavior of the evolutionary advantage afforded at the time of adoption by the human species. There is on iron rule stating that it must continue into the future, or even that it can exist into the future.

More so, the value of a human has wildly fluctuated over history and culture. The village chief, nobles, the king were all high value humans. The villagers would be middle to low value, and others may be considered no value.

The industrial age began to change this some as value started to move from the merchant class to the villager class as many high production jobs needed less and less training to complete. With industrialization businesses running machines and production lines needed as many people as they could get. Still human rights were hard fought in places like America where labor wars broke out.

In the modern US we've setup a dangerous set of idealism that will most likely end in disaster because they are in conflict with general human values. That is the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", "Any collective action is communism and communism will turn you into a pillar of salt if you dare look at it", and "greed is good". Couple that with TV media and social media owned by rich billionaires you're not going to see much serious opposition to these ideals.

But if/as labor loses it's values, so will the humans that performed that labor. After decades of optimizing human society for maximal capital extraction, values are dead, and the ever present thought police owned by the rich will make sure you don't cause too much trouble by resurrecting them.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#179

Post by johnnyanmac »

kbelder wrote: post #177
johnnyanmac wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. I'd say that that is downplaying and misrepreting the issue. You even go so far to say >Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for maki…

>You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. No, literally, he didn't.

Yes, I literally quoted it.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#180

Post by sothatsit »

IshKebab wrote: post #161
sothatsit wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trusted contributors using LLMs do not cause this problem though. It is the larger volume of low-effort contributions causing this problem, and those contributors are the most likely to ignore the policies. Therefore, policies restricting AI-use on the basis of avoiding low-quality contributions are probably hurting more than they’re helping.

I'm not sure I agree. If you have a blanket "you must disclose how you use AI" policy it's socially very easy to say "can you disclose how you used AI", and then if they say Claude code wrote it, you can just ignore it, guilt-free. Without that policy it feels rude to ask, and rude to ignore in case they didn't use AI.

I’d argue this social angle is not very nuanced or effective. Not all people who used Claude Code will be submitting low-effort patches, and bad-faith actors will just lie about their AI-use.

For example, someone might have done a lot of investigation to find the root cause of an issue, followed by getting Claude Code to implement the fix, which they then tested. That has a good chance of being a good contribution.

I think tackling this from the trust side is likely to be a better solution. One approach would be to only allow new contributors to make small patches. Once those are accepted, then allow them to make larger contributions. That would help with the real problem, which is higher volumes of low-effort contributions overwhelming maintainers.

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