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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Gentoo bans AI-created contributions
pipeline_peak wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
Only as long as they know itâs AI-created
brezelgoring wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
I see many saying that contributors will continue using AI/ML tools
clandestinely, but Iâd 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 âI will do what I will do and if you donât like it Iâll
take my things and go elsewhereâ. I donât accept that any adult,
let alone a professional developer would grin in the darkness of their
room and say to themselves âI bet you I can sneak AI code into the
Gentoo project in less than a weekâ. Whatâs the gain? Who would
they be trying to impress? Letâs 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? Thatâs
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 donât 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
brainâs. If I need long, repetitive code made, Iâve 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.
lucb1e wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
> would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves âI
bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a
weekâ. [...] 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 donât 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 wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
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 couldâve been held liable for court
fees of the other party in any other country, and lawyers arenât
cheap! I donât imagine his employers were very happy.
CuriouslyC wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
This is only gonna hurt Gentoo. They're not Ubuntu, they have no
market power.
DaSHacka wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
They seem to have been managing just fine in past years without AI
contributions, why would it suddenly be any different?
CuriouslyC wrote 33 min ago:
If you're on the fence about putting time into something, and they
start micromanaging you in a way that you don't agree with, you're
less likely to bother.
jl6 wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
The supply chain risk elephant in the room is that bad-quality
LLM-derived contributions could be kept out by the same rigorous review
process that keeps out bad-quality human contributions. Now where did I
leave that process? I'm sure I saw it around here somewhere...
xyst wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Seems more like contributors will continue to use AI tools but wonât
specifically mention it.
Outright deny. Innocent until proven guilty, right?
No easy way to prove a commit, or piece of documentation was AI or not.
Seems more like a virtue signaling to me
ragestorm wrote 2 hours 59 min ago:
CYA and PR.
lucb1e wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
Does Gentoo really need PR you think? I'm not sure there's not a
corporate division, but the main website says they're a foundation.
(Then again, seeing how the cashflow works in places like Mozilla,
maybe I should put less stock in that.)
There's a CYA aspect in one of the three reasons mentioned
(copyright concerns), I'm not sure that's necessarily bad if the
thing they're banning is objectionable for (in their opinion) also
two further reasons
lucb1e wrote 2 hours 59 min ago:
Had to look virtue signaling up:
> a pejorative neologism for the idea that an expression of a moral
viewpoint is being done disingenuously
(--Wikipedia. Apparently it was a term was newly invented in 2004 and
used by religions in 2010 and 2012. Then a journalist picked it up in
2015. Interesting to see a word so new that isn't a youth thing like
yeet!)
How is it disingenuous to ban this, what self-interest do they have
in it?
apetresc wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Firstly, please let me know which rock you've been living under for
the last ~8 years to not know what 'virtue signalling' means, it
sounds awesome and I would like to join you under there.
Anyway, the insinuation is that they don't actually believe they
can reduce the rate of AI contribution via such a statement, but
that they're doing it just for the sake of showing everyone that
they're on the anti-AI side of the fence, which indeed does seem to
have become some sort of ideological signpost for a certain group
of people.
JohnFen wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
Making a rule that is difficult to enforce isn't virtue
signalling at all. It's adding a rule that is expected to be
adhered to just like the other rules. It's useful to say outright
what the expectations and requirements of contributions are.
Actual "virtue signalling" is espousing a position that you don't
really believe in because you think it makes you look good.
lucb1e wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
I suppose I'm one of today's lucky ten thousand. Join any time,
the only requirement is learning something new every day!
> some sort of ideological signpost for a certain group of
people.
That feels about as laden and insinuating as the formerly
religious term from above. Do you think it's not okay to state
that a method of creating works may not be used when one believes
it to be (*checks the reasons given in the article*) potentially
illegal under copyright, unethical in various ways (not sure how
to summarize that), as well as exceedingly difficult to get
quality output from? One of those reasons seem to me like it
would be enough to use as grounds, with the only potentially
subjective one being the ethics which would leave two other
reasons
I don't have a strong opinion on the ban, in case it seems that
way. The reasons make sense to me so while I'm not opposed
either, I'm also not a fan of selective enforcement that this
runs a risk of, and the world moves on (progress is hard to
halt). Perhaps there's an "AI" tool that can be ethical and free
of copyright claims, and then the resulting work can be judged by
its own merit to resolve the quality concern. So I don't really
have a solid opinion either way, it just doesn't seem bad to me
to make a statement for what one believes to be right
Edit: perhaps I should bring this back to the original question.
Is this virtue signaling if (per my understanding) it is genuine?
I've scarcely known open source people (Gentoo isn't corporate,
afaik) to have ulterior motives so, to me, the claim feels a
bit... negative towards a group trying to do good, I guess?
ToucanLoucan wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
> Firstly, please let me know which rock you've been living under
for the last ~8 years to not know what 'virtue signalling' means,
it sounds awesome and I would like to join you under there.
On the other hand it's been my experience that the only people
using it unironically as a term are the sorts of people I don't
want to talk to for any appreciable length of time, and them
self-identifying by using it is extremely handy for me
personally.
It's like the reverse Nigerian prince email scam, as soon as
someone drops "virtue signaling" I know to immediately disengage
lest I be exposed to toxic and deranged opinions that are both
low effort and boring to hear litigated.
exe34 wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
To save me from having to remember your name, please add me to
your list of people who use the phrase "virtue signalling"
unironically, even if I do so sparingly.
fire_lake wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Interesting thread. I doubt they could tell reliably if AI tools are
used though.
swatcoder wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
You can't automate perfect enforcement, but you can express a norm
(as they have) and hold individual human contributors accountable for
following it so that when a violation is discoved the humanms other
contributions can be scrutinized and the human can be
penalized/monitored/whatever going forward.
People bicker over the quality of generated content vs human content,
but accountability is actually the big challenge when granting agency
to AI tools.
There are many humans who might produce or contribute to a work, and
when they violate norms it's accepted that we can hold the person
individually accountable in some way or another -- perhaps by
rejecting them, replacing them, or even suing them. Much the way
mature financial systems depend on many features of legal and
regulatory norms that crypto can'f deliver, most mature organizations
depend on accountability that's not so easy to transfer to software
agents.
If there are a handful of code generators and they're granted
autonomy/agency without an accountable vouchsafe, what do you do when
they violate your norms? Perhaps you try to debug them, but what does
that process look like for a black box instrument? How does that work
when those services are hosted by third-parties who themselves reject
accountability and who only expose a small interface for
modification?
Here, Gentoo dodges the problem entirely by saying effectively saying
"we're not going to leave room for somebody to poiny to an AI tool as
an excuse for errant work.. if they contribute, they need to take
accountability as if the work is wholly and originally theirs by
representing it as so."
Contributors may violate that policy by using AI anyway, but they
can't use it as an excuse/out for other violations because they now
need to stay steadfast in their denial that AI was involved.
So ultimately, this doesn't mean that generated code won't appear in
Gentoo, but it makes sure contributed code is held to no lower a
standard of accountability.
xyst wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
There are some cases where you can kind of tell but yea itâs a crap
shoot. Any itâs all based on intuition.
Artwork, yea itâs kind of easy - âkid in photo has 10 fingers on
one handâ. But for text, especially code or technical
documentation.
I honestly wouldnât be able to tell.
Xenoamorphous wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
If no one is able to tell, does it matter?
lucb1e wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
I think it does, at least until it produces better work than
humans on average/median. We have enough trouble spotting bugs
(including vulnerabilities) before they hit a beta or production
release as it is. If the same diligence went into checking
machine output, I think we would get worse code because in the
scenario where you wrote it yourself (I'm imagining a patch here,
not a whole project), you've got a good understanding of what you
just wrote: how it's meant to work, why that method works, what
the intention was with every statement. With machine output, you
have to build that understanding before you can validate its
work, and with the state of the art as far as I'm aware, the
validation step really is necessary.
It is also a matter of the universe versus the software
engineers. With the universe striving to make better idiots¹ who
can all tell a machine what it should do in natural language
without needing ~any skills, it would be the task of other people
to mop up their potential mess. (Not saying that prompt
engineering is a skill, just that you can get started without
having acquired that skill yet.)
Open source contributions are a benefit in several ways: it looks
good on your CV, you feel like you're helping society, or perhaps
you just want to fix a bug that you're personally affected by. I
can see legitimate motives for using "AI" as seven-league boots,
but the result where someone else has to do the work for you in
the end seems immoral, even if that someone can't tell if the
person was just unskilled or if it's machine-generated ("AI")
output
¹
URI [1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Com...
lucb1e wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
The article's answer to that:
> Górny wrote that it was unlikely that the project could detect
these contributions, or that it would want to actively pursue finding
them. The point, he said, is to make a statement that they are
undesirable.
> In an emailed response to questions, Górny said that Gentoo is
relying on trust in its contributors to adhere to the policy rather
than trying to police contributions [...] "our primary goal is to
make it clear what's acceptable and what's not, and politely ask our
contributors to respect that"
MR4D wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to submit some
background artwork that is created by AI.
Man, slippery slope!!
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