for fuck sakes; stop pretending the csam generating machine is useful.
Just because you could not find a use for it, does not mean millions of other people have not.
Just like any technology. you can use it responsibly or irresponsibly.
if people are finding use for a csam generating machine, i hope they get a visit from the fbi
I take it you think the only use for a microwave is to cook babies?
There is no way (in this world that we have created) to use AI “responsibly”. No matter what you choose, you are building on the base of wage theft, human suffering, environmental destruction and empowerment of the oligarchies.
AI is not “like any other technology”. That’s techbro acceleracionist slopaganda.
No, not really. There are models based on freely given training data. There are models used without wasting large amounts of electricity. There are models that aren’t used to empower the oligarchs.
It sounds like you are mad at our economic and societal structures, but taking your anger out on the tools.
It sounds like you are mad at our economic and societal structures, but taking your anger out on the tools.
I can be mad at both the exploitative structures and at the toolkits that enable, further and synthetize them. They don’t need to be mutually exclusive, and in general it’s not useful that they are.
So are you mad at power-tools? The internet? Cars? Because they are “building on the base of wage theft, human suffering, environmental destruction and empowerment of the oligarchies.”
Why are you mad at one set of tools, but not the other sets of tools?
Not really. What, you expect me to be mad at the wheelbarrow?
Geez, the low meda literacy and the silly arguments of absurdum from the people who try everything to sell a cage for which they don’t have the keys is unprecedented.
Then why are you mad at AI? Those fit all of the same requrirements that you listed above. Why do you think one is bad, but not the other?
Would you say the same of electricity? There is no way to use it responsibly because its all based on exploitative resource extraction?
Please, try at least some modicum of intellectual discourse. Electricity is quite a physical phenomenon of nature, like rain, we can not impart moral judgment on them.
All that said, there are ways to use electricity without “exploitative resource extraction”, for example with a potato.
You need to divorce your thinking of AI as a current prominent manifestation of the capitalistic black hole and the technology itself. Before that is was Crypto. Before that it was cloud, before that it was property derivatives. Capitalism will just hijack anything where they can extract value from the quickest.
AI as a technology is very much real and very much physical, it follows the same physical rules that everything else is. Denying that is like saying steam power is not real because you can’t see the force pushing.
AI has been around for 50 years now. Its driven much of engineering progress in the 70s and 80s, our chemical and biological research in the 90s and physics in the 2000s.
The current large language learning models are just a next progression of this technological trend.
Remember absolutism is toxic.
You need to divorce your thinking
I already did, but you refuse to read it. I explicitly said this is about how A (or what people call “AI”, because it certainly has not existed for “around for 50 years now”) exist in this world how we have created it. Via theft, exploitation and destruction, and oriented to the fulfillment of the elites and the oppression of the worker class.
Absolutism is toxic, yes. Moderated realism upon a flagrant observation of reality as conducted, is not.
AI has been around for 50 years now.
I really don’t care.
This is so divorced from the current discussion of what AI is doing now that it’s a waste of time even talking about it.
No matter what you choose, you are building on the base of wage theft, human suffering, environmental destruction and empowerment of the oligarchies
so… like… any other technology after all then?.. otherwise I highly suggest you throw away your phone, your store-bought clothes, most of what you own, really.
Oh look it’s the same accelerationist argument as usual, that just because you loathe one technology you must throw away all of them.
Try at least high-school grade of discussion.
Try at least high-school grade of discussion.
Agreed, you really should take that advice to heart! I mean, I get it, it’s fun to hate the new thing with everyone else and virtue signal as hard as you can, as long as you don’t try to apply the same level of vigor to literally any other part of your life. This is The Bad Thing and you are The Good One because you hate The Bad Thing. Time to tell everyone
Imagine calling AI “the csam generating machine” but not cameras.
No, you’re right, those Meta glasses are also powerful csam-generating machines.
In a nutshell, it looks like AI disclosures are encouraged, but not required, and AI usage is encouraged to be human reviewed, but not required. They have also stated they will not allow the use of online AI services for security reasons (but how this will be enforced I’m not sure, since they are relying on the judgement of contributors)
No online services? So you can use AI to generate code, but only garbage local AIs (assuming you don’t have a ton of RAM)?
This seems like the weakest possible decision they could’ve made.
It’s open source software. I’m not saying security isn’t a concern, but this is just stupid.
If you’re not going to ban AI then you should at least take advantage of models that are more reliable and produce higher quality output.
They’re getting better fast
https://www.xda-developers.com/qwen-3-8-27b-reverse-engineering-job-frontier-model/
Still unreliable for tasks which aren’t easy to validate in code, though
You are not supposed to use online LLMs for undisclosed security stuff; there is no general ban of online services if you can take responsibility for the stuff it produces for the contributor. At least, this is how I read the general resolution.
This is one more reason, that using Debian as my main distro was a good choice.
Ah my bad, that makes more sense.
It looks like their point is that they don’t want Debian’s codebase to be used to train corporate AI models, and almost all the proposals seem to agree on that at the very least. I feel like a required AI disclosure would have been better, but what do I know, I’m not a Debian contributor
I mean the best local models are only a few months behind the the best proprietary cloud models. Just look at Qwen 3.8 Flash or 27B. Imo local models are more than sufficient if you’re going to use AI for programming. Who cares if the small model can’t oneshot the whole patch, you shouldn’t be submitting raw LLM code to public repos anyway. Imo the only acceptable use of LLMs for coding is as a way of rapidly prototyping ideas that you will later mostly/entirely rewrite by hand, or as an extra static analysis tool for finding potential security holes.
And as someone who frankly doesn’t give a shit about intellectual property over code, my main ethical issue with LLMs is the monstrous resource consumption of hyperscale datacenters, so local models are strongly preferable. Also for privacy reasons.
They basically pass the buck to the individual developer without taking any responsibility themselves.
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material.
The responsibility for every contribution rests with the contributor who submits it, who remains accountable for its technical quality, legal acceptability, and suitability for inclusion in Debian.
“It may be illegal or against FOSS, but that’s up to you do decide, good luck I guess”
There is no such thing as “responsible use of GenAI”. That said, I understand the decision in the face of even Linus Torvalds allowing AI-generated code into the kernel. If Debian would have banned AI code entirely they would have had to fork every single thing they include in their distro, wipe the AI code from it, and then work to develop it further themselves. It would be too gargantuan a task.
None of the proposals would have banned AI usage in upstream projects, but banning AI usage in the context of the Debian project was on the table
This is good news; Debian is still the way to go for me:
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material. The Project does not seek to resolve these unsettled legal questions through this General Resolution, nor does it adopt a position on whether AI-generated output is, in whole or in part, copyrightable or derived from copyrighted works.
I love Debian. An ol’ rock ballad from the 90s
As long as they don’t allow AI bots to submit changes, this is probably a realistic decision. Assuming that code generated by AI is never going to be copyrighted by the AI companies. In light of this uncertainty I don’t understand why they don’t require AI code to be flagged as such. That bit seems like a really bad idea, legally speaking.
Good thing I don’t use debian.
This is like saying “Responsible use of highly infectious diseases.”
Like… In research for vaccines?
Great example. It’s good for that, it must be good universally, so let’s use it for everything. Let’s force people to use it for everything, because it has one legitimate and specific use case scenario.
Yeah, let’s use infectious diseases for socialising with people.
Cough on the face of the person you want to say hello to… Wait… People already do that.
Ohh you mean like the prize winning Folding project that google just shut down so that they could reassign all the staff to work on Gemini instead?
The project that reached its goals and is the basis for new projects? Yeah
Lmfao
This bro doesn’t understand AI, protein folding, or code at all but speaks as an authority on it all.
Their model for folding proteins worked, is complete and access is given freely to researchers for use. I’m not sure what you think they should be working on now, are the people who made it supposed to just never move on to new projects?
Notice how they’ve provided access to 200 million protein predictions in the human proteome and various plants?
Does that sound like it has completed prediction for proteomes of all life on earth?
Does it ever say it is complete even if only for humans?
Does it ever say the workers on the project had verified the validity of even a fraction of the predictions or discovered application of the findings?
It wasn’t “finished”, it was shut down and the employees reassigned to work on a project that produvesw nothing but worthless slop images and texts, buggy code, and occasionally deletes a database.
That’s a very apt analogy
Unfortunately, they’re not taking nearly the amount of caution needed. So this is like experimenting with highly infections diseases in a middle school bio lab with no one wearing ppe
It’s almost certainly going to go wrong. And once it does, you can’t undo it
This email from 2016 by jwz springs to mind.
I guess you want Debian to be the kind of operation that uses the work of others while blatantly and explicitly ignoring the wishes of the person who did the actual creative work.
I am increasingly of the opinion that all software developers and adjacent people are fucking scum unless proven otherwise.
Oh no, the people creating free shit for you to use that’s not monetized in any way, want to reduce their workloads. Scum!
You mean the work that that nobody is forcing them to do? The one they do by their own choice while not asking consent and respecting the wishes of others? Yep those devs sound pretty fucking scummy to me.
as a dev I second this opinion.
I was surprised by how many were Trump supporters.
then I was surprised at how many were anti-vax.
now I’m not even surprised.
Citations on Debian doing any of these?
i’m actually a little surprised, given their history about being so hardcore about dfsg compliance.
AI may be the one thing in life I find hard to boycott lmao.
Dammit. Need to find a new OS.
If you want to avoid ai assisted code your only chance is to build a new OS with a new kernel yourself.
True. I’m really not happy with the avalanche of dogshit produced by “AI” though. Maybe I need to find a new hobby.
Linus Torvalds has stated a similar policy for the Linux kernel. If you’re really serious about avoiding the power loom, you have to change the kernel too.
Yikes, rest in peace Deb users. I just hope it never happens to my distro.
if your distro uses the linux kernel then its already happened.
Thankfully, Arch based distros allow you to install any of a variety of supported kernels and even has instructions on many unofficial kernels, as Linus stated: “if you don’t like it you can fork it”.
Also, your response comes off as pretty sloppy and defeatist.
What is the AI policy of Arch? I ask because I was unable to find any explicit policy for the project
its not defeatist, i just dont give a shit.
This vote was not about upstream projects included in the Debian distro, it was about the Debian project itself.
i didnt say it was. the guy i was responding too wasnt talking abput debian but whatever distro he uses. implying it was free of any ai assisted code.
I ain’t shook up about it. There’s not really a surefire way to detect tool-assisted code gen anyway, so IMO the acceptance criteria should be the same as it’s always been, tool-assisted or otherwise. Which is ultimately the path they chose to take.
Obvious slop should be immediate permanently banworthy, sloppers can just keep burning new accounts (as long as they have access to new IP addresses) while real developers deserving of praise and reputation thrive.
Yep. I’m not familiar with Debian’s strategy specifically, but generally, I think any new contributor to a project should be subject to heightened scrutiny. My policy is that new contributors should start small and develop a rapport with the maintainers before submitting more ambitious (and for the maintainers, more costly to review) large and/or critical path PRs. It was a good policy before LLMs and I think it remains a pretty robust method of weeding out irresponsible devs without wasting a ton of maintainer time. There are simply more slop PRs to reject sight unseen these days, which is admittedly very annoying, but the process is much the same as it’s always been.
I’ll admit I don’t maintain any projects anywhere near the popularity or volume of the Debian project, so I’m not really sure what the view is from their vantage point.
I still think that’s not good enough, that treating them fairly is a stupid waste of time and resources and unfair to everyone else.
Just make the rule “any slop” and give the idiots a checkbox so they can ban themselves for reasons which will never be revealed to them (sloppers don’t read documents, it’ll take them a while to figure out). Also start banning people when evidence surfaces of them admitting to slopping.
I don’t like this concept that a slopper can potentially produce decent code, the data shows this simply isn’t true: sloppers produce vast amounts more and worse bugs and vulnerabilities. It’s better for the health of the project to ban it in every scenario.
How is treating one contributor fairly unfair to another contributor? If you want to add a “check this box to get your PR dumpster’d” checkbox I guess go nuts, but I’m unconvinced that’s a good long-term solution. I find it easier to ask “Do I know this contributor, or did they follow the new contributor guidelines and submit a small, single-issue PR?”, and if the answer is “no” then the PR gets ignored or, if I’m feeling gregarious and have the time, rejected with change requests. It’s a pretty easy rubric.
Humans have been perfectly capable of generating huge volumes of trash code, and code that looks good at first glance but has tricky bugs or vulnerabilities, since long before LLMs were a thing. The only real change now is the pace at which shitty code can be ripped out. IMO the solution is just: don’t accept more code than you can review and test. If that means rejecting 10x or 100x more LoC than you did five years ago, then… ok. It is more busy work, and it is annoying. But I don’t think trusting contributors to self-declare LLM use is an answer to the problem. There are better ways of rate-limiting eager beavers, regardless of what tools they use.
How is treating one contributor fairly unfair to another contributor?
Because sloppers do not actually do the work and in the vast majority of cases are not even capable of doing so. A slopper can produce 10 worthless products in the time a person can produce 1 good product.
sloppers can just keep burning new accounts (as long as they have access to new IP addresses) while real developers deserving of praise and reputation thrive.
Becoming a Debian developer requires you to meet an existing Debian developer in person and have your public key signed by them. It’s not possible to keep burning new accounts unless you go and meet a different Debian developer each time and there’s a limited number of them in each region and they usually meet together, so more than one person will see your face.
The only question I have is why. Genuinely.
Debian exists. It has existed for decades. It works. “Oh but AI makes it faster” so fucking what? We didn’t need “faster” for years whilst it worked fine, it’s not a product on a deadline.
That’s true. Nonetheless the maintainers seem to see AI as a valid way to reduce their workload.
As someone who has done package management for a distro at one point in my life… after the initial push, it is so incredibly boring.
I think AI should do all of it. I’m entirely certain that things would be better, not worse, if we did. 99% of problems related to that stuff is because it’s so fucking boring that humans just simply cannot pay the kind of attention it requires to be safe.
Current AI is still like that incredibly knowledgeable senior dev with a drug problem. Everything done by AI still needs to be checked by a human in case the AI just hallucinated the wildest shit even though it did the same thing just right ten times before.
Right now, AI is a great tool. It will probably become reliable enough to replace human maintainers. But no one knows when that happens.Current AI is still like that incredibly knowledgeable senior dev with a drug problem.
So you mean exactly like most package maintainers prior to AI?
No community distro has the capacity to fork thousands of packages and maintain them. That’s what a true no Ai policy would require. I also have to add that the Linux kernel itself would need to be forked and then maintained. Just the latter point alone is enough to make all this moot.
No this was for Debian only.
Completely missing the point.
