Following Codeberg already doing so, independent software development platform SourceHut moves to prohibit LLM content on their platform. Their announcement is quite informative and with plenty of references to back up their reasoning. I particularly like this part:
As software engineers we have front-row seats for the deployment of one of the world's fastest growing energy consumers: AI. Our conscience calls us to resist the deployment of technologies which will exacerbate death and suffering for millions. AI might deliver benefits to society, but the cost is so high that we need to make careful decisions about how it's deployed and if the benefits to society outweigh those costs. On the whole, vibe coding does not deliver benefits which, in the view of SourceHut and our community, outweigh the costs. Cheap, green electricity, preservation of freshwater resources, husbanding our planet and its wildlife: these are all much more important than AI-assisted coding.
The broader social and economic consequences add to the alarm. These tools are disrupting labor and increasing the already unprecedented gap between the haves and the have-nots. These companies pay minimum wage in inhumane conditions in impoverished countries for the labor they exploit to train models that can be applied to taking the bottom out of the labor market in wealthy countries. Moreover, the accumulated wealth of the AI owners, and the depleted resources of the AI proletariat, is further exploited to consolidate power, enable the rise of fascism, and destroy the social order alongside the environmental order. AI is being used to deport immigrants without due process, surveil and police poor and racialized communities, manipulate elections and political discourse, facilitate crimes against humanity at scale, and amplify injustices in our institutions.
Finally, AI simply seems to be bad for the people who use it. Many open source maintainers complain of being exhausted by a deluge of low-quality AI generated contributions. AI has been linked to "deskilling", making its users worse at problem solving and other cognitive tasks. And the number of people who have been talked into psychosis or suicide by their chatbots continues to rise.
These concerns are myriad, credible, and demand action. Our small contribution to the problem is to clearly state our position on the matter and adjust our policies to provide a safe platform for people who are concious of these issues to work and find community.
I feel like we're heading in the direction of a schism, with open source communities on the one side, and corporations and business aligned individuals and projects on the other.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @04:45AM (2 children)
I was wondering if their decision might have been influenced by Chinese backed leftist propaganda so I did one quick check and yes there it is:
https://rdrr.io/github/hrbrmstr/sourcehut/f/CONDUCT.md [rdrr.io]
So everything seems to check out so far...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @05:43AM
Where is the Chinese connection you allege?
At your link I see a typical "Contributor Code of Conduct" which you may disagree with but ends with: "This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant...". This link has one date, from 2019, hardly an active site. Also, there is a link to a "personal blog" to a page that doesn't seem to have been updated in about 10 years.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday August 30, @08:16AM
What does it mean?
Chinese term 宗 [Zong] for 'project aim', 'purpose' as in software or engineering, is the same as the term for 'sect' or 'faction', traditionally applicable to martial arts schools.
It designates coherent goal of the collective, a specific kind of mastery.
If you deliberately attack a project person, you will be challenged to fight.
Public cultural attacks against the project fundamental idea may require proof by blade, if illogical.
I would not recommend to attack technically a project infrastructure at all. That's a deathwish.
Well, such groups always have plenty surplus of fresh adepts wanting to make themselves a name in Jianghu...
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bentonite on Sunday August 30, @09:52AM
"open source" from the start has been about licking corporate boot - for example, covering up the f-word (freedom), in the hope that corporates hire the developer to work on the software, so the software can become functionally better, faster.
In practice, while the corporates may integrate the software into their proprietary software, they almost never hire the developers and often even go so far to forbid their existing employees from contributing anything back (even though it would be their sole benefit, if employees were to send in a few patches that do nothing more than making it more convenient to keep the proprietary fork up to date).
SourceHut is a business and also does not qualify for "open source" - if you would like to host a project on sr.ht, you must execute proprietary software, without source code, from stripe to make payment (the controller may decide at his discretion whether to accept payment some other way or not).
Reviewing SourceHut's old ToS, it was terrible, but one of the few reasonable conditions it has, already disallowed copy-pasting software without including the license, or any attribution (what degenerating software with a LLM constitutes), but for some reason the existing terms couldn't be enforced and there needed to be new terms added?