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Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

lwn.net

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

#291

Post by ncruces »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #276
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work. "Open source" does not mean "open contribution", i.e. just because…

Google Guava Java library is very similar -- open source, but almost never accepts outside contributions. Is the golang base library similar?

Not so far. All my contributions where welcomed.

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

#292

Post by cowboylowrez »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #279
yodsanklai wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without a battle of ego. This resonates. Recently, I've started to consider Claude as a partner. I like how he's willing to accept he's wrong when you provide evidence. It can be more pleasant than working with humans.

Please don't anthropomorphize LLMs even further by assigning them gendered pronouns. LLMs are always "it"s. They're not alive, they're just really complicated linear algebra expressions. Prematurely anthropomorphizing them, even subtly like this, will come back to bite us if we keep doing it.

I just think that if I treat my AI GF like that she'll just pout and end up giving me the silent treatment and I'll have to reboot her.

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

#293

Post by thunderfork »

pixl97 wrote: post #280
thunderfork wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing that "doesn't secretly, sneakily break project rules" is an essential component of a quality contributor isn't a "no true scotsman" argument, it's a statement about qualifications

You see where this becomes a religious like argument right? Since it's secretly and sneakily there is no way to measure it. So as far as any other participant knows there is no measurable difference, hence your argument depends on said agents to be 'pure' and 'true', hence the exact definition of the no true Scotsman fallacy. I hope you see how this quickly will advance from a project being about accomplishing some g…

The point of the rule isn't enforcement, it's setting standards for good-faith contributors.

Your assumption that all rules must be about enforcement is incorrect. Your assumption that only that which can be measured matters is incorrect. I don't know where this belief system comes from, but it strikes me as profoundly toxic.

By this logic, we obviously shouldn't ban drinking and driving - there's no way to test every driver every time, and presumably those most skilled at drunk driving would be undetectable, so it's really just religious moralism.

"Good drivers don't drink and drive even if they think they can get away with it" is just a no-true-scotsman argument, and thus we should actually encourage people to drink and drive so that they get better at it. Nobody should ever have any standards that can't be automatically enforced by a linter, after all.

And look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

Unenforceable rules might just be the backbone of society, if you think about it.

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

#294

Post by LtWorf »

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #237

I don't particularly care if vibe coding and the like are used for web apps and mobile apps. The quality there has always been poor and gets worse over time. AI slopware is just the new low and in a few years time I'm sure they will find a way to make things even worse. But for software infrastructure; Kernels, operating systems, compilers, browsers, etc, it is crazy we are even considering AI at it's current ability…

If it can comfort you, on the mailing list the main developer for ext4 is in favour of using AI

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

#296

Post by heavyset_go »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #234
heavyset_go wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules. No, it's not that simple. AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed. This matters for open source projects that care about licensing. It should also matter for proprietary code bases, as anyone can co…

> AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed. Translation: AI generated code is in the public domain in the US (until and unless something changes). You can freely incorporate public domain code into any other codebase. You can relicense it as you see fit. Public domain material is not viral the way the GPL is. Furthermore, if you make changes to public domain code the…

You can "relicense" it as you see fit, but anyone can just copy it and ignore your license and its terms entirely, it's not your property to put a license on.

See also Red Hat IP lawyer's opinion on trying to license the chardet "rewrite": https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334#issuecomment-4...

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

#297

Post by pabs3 »

LtWorf wrote: post #295
amelius wrote: post #275

That's ok but imho they should work on AI from the user's point of view. At this moment it is impossible to "apt-get install" most of the new AI stuff, and get it working with the GPU.

There are no free models so…

rnnoise is now a free AI model for removing noise from audio. Firefox ships with Bergamot, which is a set of (probably) free AI models for translating between human languages. There might be other ones too, but I haven't looked very far.

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

#298

Post by pabs3 »

MintPaw wrote: post #102

An interesting concept that stood out to me. Committing the prompts instead of the resulting code only. It it really true the LLM's are non-deterministic? I thought if you used the exact input and seed with the temperature set to 0 you would get the same output. It would actually be interesting to probe the commit prompts to see how slight variants preformed.

The LWN comments say that you are correct for local AIs (but not LLM services), modulo some caveats about compiler flags and hardware used.

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

#299

Post by fwip »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #287
fwip wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high value contributors won't follow it High-value contributors follow the rules and social mores of the community they are contributing to. If they intentionally deceive others, they are not high-value.

This is a good example of my point. Instead of progressing to a system resilient to the fact that you can't know how code was written, you've created a rule that, because it's unenforceable and deniable, must retreat to moralization about what someone does in private. That might make you feel good, but it won't work.

The same argument applies to not including copyrighted code. I can't possibly know if a contribution is a direct copy of some private code somewhere, but it's still reasonable to have a policy against it.

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

#300

Post by LtWorf »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #259
fidorka wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?

If you see developer rooting for using MIT/BSD licenses and especially replacing GPL with them, there is probably good 98% chance of them being corporate programmer that legal didn't allow to use GPL-licensed code and they are sad they can't steal everyone's work

Last elections for DPL it was the stated goal of one of the candidates to reduce the amount of copyleft in debian.

At least they didn't win.

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