[brezelgoring]

I see many saying that contributors will continue using AI/ML tools clandestinely, but I’d counter that only a malicious actor would act in this manner.

The ban touches on products made specifically for Gentoo, a distribution made entirely with Free/Libre software, made (mostly) by volunteers. Why would any of these volunteers, who chose to develop for the Gentoo distribution specifically - presumably because of their commitment to Free/Libre software and its community - go along with using AI tools that: A) Were trained on the work of thousands of developers without their consent and without regard for the outcomes of said training; and B) go against the wishes of the project maintainers and by extension the community, willingly choosing to go against the mission of the distribution and its tenets of Free/Libre software?

It sounds to me that people would do this either unknowingly, by not knowing this particular piece of news, or maliciously, making a choice to say “I will do what I will do and if you don’t like it I’ll take my things and go elsewhere”. I don’t accept that any adult, let alone a professional developer would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. What’s the gain? Who would they be trying to impress? Let’s not even open the big vault of problems of security that an AI coder would bring. What if your mundane calculator app gets an integral solving algorithm that is the same, down to the letter, as the one used in a Microsoft product? That’s grounds for a lawsuit, if MS cared to look for it.

The former case may prompt a reconsideration from the board - If key personnel drives the hard bargain, the potential loss of significant tribal knowledge may outweigh the purity of such a blanket ban on AI. The latter case surely will bring about some though, but of staying the ship and making the ban even more stringent.

On a personal note, I use no AI products, maybe I picked them up too early but I don’t like what they produce. If I need complex structures made, I am 100% more comfortable designing them myself, as I have enough problems trying to read my own code, let alone a synthetic brain’s. If I need long, repetitive code made, I’ve had a long time to practice with VIM/Python/Bash and can reproduce hundreds of lines with tiny differences in minutes. AI Evangelists may think they found the Ark but to me, all they found was a briefcase with money in it.

[DonsDiscountGas]

I work on open source projects, I use ChatGPT and Copilot. I've yet to see any convincing argument why I shouldn't use advanced auto-complete to do my job faster, or how copying and pasting from StackOverflow (while using adblockers) is fine but copying and pasting from ChatGPT is evil.

[zvr]

But how can you then sign a DCO or a CLA for contributing? Both of these say that you certify that you are the author (or you know that you have the legal rights to contribute the content). How do you know this for generated content?

[brezelgoring]

That's fine, using those tools is your prerogative and I won't deny it or besmirch you because of it. That being said, going to a project such as Gentoo's - defined by its ideals of Free/Libre software and its commitment to users of Free/Libre software - and intentionally go against the grain by using AI is what I protested against, as do the other contributors and council members.

Using AI, such as ChatGPT and Claude and such, in contributions to Free/Libre software, is not practically wrong, it's ideologically wrong. It is so, in my opinion, because the AI was produced by a company that did not ask anyone for permission when incorporating training materials (applies to all commercial AI products of today), it did not respect the liberties of its contributors nor its rights to ownership of their work (applies to all commercial AI products of today), and now asks of you to foot the bill for whatever slop it produces (applies to most commercial AI products of today, some are still free to use).

You can use your tools if you like them, that's fine, I'm not your boss. But on that last point, a large majority of users I've encountered, in this thread even, seem to agree that all AI-produced works need retouching (big or small retouching, though most often big) in order to be usable in any serious endeavor. Midjourney users need to touch up the fingers and the landscapes and look for artifacts of all kinds. Copilot users need to rewrite whole algorithms sometimes because of plagiarism and outright erroneous calculations (unless you don't care). ChatGPT needs to be fact-checked if you ask it to write anything significant.

I ask you this, if you have to oversee everything it produces, costs money, and is generally agreed to produce low-quality work, why not hire a junior employee instead? Freshers, as our fellows in India would call them. Lord knows we need more of them.

[duped]

I don't think it's evil, but I think it generates bad code that I have to fix all the time. It's very annoying when developers use it to effectively copy and paste code snippets that should be wrapped in a function and then the bugs that Copilot drops in have to be fixed in twelve places instead of one.

[lucb1e]

> would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. [...] Who would they be trying to impress?

I agree with most of what you said, but as someone working in the security field, I know enough adults that I'd suspect doing something just for the heck of it. Not maliciously for any particular gain, but for the hack value -- assuming it's not deemed too easy to pull off and thus not interesting to try

Overall, of course, yeah I agree people generally want to do good, and doubly so in a community like Gentoo

> maybe I picked them up too early but I don’t like what they produce.

You don't use translation engines? As someone living in a country whose language they're still learning, I can't tell you how helpful translations from DeepL are. They're not flawless, but it's at a level that I come across polite and well enough towards someone like a prospective landlord or government agency, and my language skills good enough that I can see where it got the meaning wrong (so long as it's not some subtlety, but then it tries to be formal so that's also not often an issue). I'm sure there's more examples but just in general, I really do see their benefit even if I also see the concerns

[brezelgoring]

I agree with the use of such tools in our personal lives, as liability is not as big a problem and the stakes are lower generally.

I only object to the use of AI in places where I have to put my signature and will be held liable for whatever output the AI decides to give me.

Like that Lawyer that made a whole deposition with AI and got laughed out of the room, he could’ve been held liable for court fees of the other party in any other country, and lawyers aren’t cheap! I don’t imagine his employers were very happy.