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Disclosure optional, quality mandatory:
The Debian community has voted to allow members to use generative AI when creating their contributions, with the caveat that developers remain responsible for code quality.
The Linux distro's community recently decided to develop a policy on use of AI-assisted coding tools, and asked participants to vote on one of eight proposals that included an outright ban, cautious use, or just avoiding LLMs because of their impact on Earth's environment.
The rules of the vote saw community members asked to rank each of the eight proposals. Just under 600 people voted, but Debian's election team rejected many for unspecified reasons, leaving almost 450 valid votes to count.
When the tallying was done, proposal E – "Responsible Use of Generative AI" – won the day.
The proposal means "Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools in the development, maintenance, or documentation of software, packaging, documentation, and other media published within the Debian Project."
The proposal advocates that approach because "such tools can substantially improve the productivity of contributors when used responsibly, allowing volunteers to spend more of their limited time on work that requires technical expertise, judgment, review, and collaboration."
The proposal also spells out that the Debian community doesn't believe "AI made a mistake" is an excuse for sloppy contributions.
"The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance," the proposal states. "The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian."
Woe betide the dev who doesn't check their AI-generated code, as the proposal also states, "Blindly accepting or uploading AI-generated material without appropriate human review is inconsistent with Debian's established development practices."
Another element of the proposal tries to make acknowledging the use of AI a norm.
"We encourage our contributors to disclose whether a contribution was made with AI assistance, but do not require them to do so," the text states.
As our FOSS aficionado Liam Proven wrote in his report on the vote, the Gentoo Linux team has banned use of AI, while NetBSD and OpenBSD don't want any clanker-written code contributions.
Linus Torvalds, arguably the most influential figure in the FOSS community, welcomes AI-generated contributions.
In July he declared "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects" – and recently proved it by using AI to squash a tricky bug. Torvalds has also sometimes complained about AI, such as his May observation that AI-generated bug reports sometimes made the Linux security mailing list "unmanageable."
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02, @05:22AM (4 children)
Sooo continually moving goal-posts?
Whenever the statement has made, comes the response, "Yeah, but that was _yesterday_! Have you tried again *today*?!?"
Monday, August 31st:
- https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/08/30/2256250 [soylentnews.org]
"AI Agents Meant To Replace Meta Workers Made “Large-Scale, Disruptive Actions”
This Al shit causes more problems than it solves, and is not capable of being used productively.
Cue the replies about how it's a different type, different purpose "Yeah, but--" etc. I guess this is out of date. It was literally yesterday, and the contents was based around back in may -- three whole months ago. So I guess it's just out-of-date all over again. Shrug. Just like the Al lobbyists, "It'll change the world!! We just need MOAR training data! MOAR datacenters! Bigger graphics cards! More processing! More power!"
(Score: 1, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday September 02, @11:41AM
One of the things routinely missed here is that much of that aggressive new data center construction goes towards improving AI. One should expect that what AI was capable of in the past will not be the limit of what it is capable of in the future.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 02, @12:11PM (2 children)
>Sooo continually moving goal-posts?
Ummm.... yeah. Automobiles 100 years ago were absolutely wretched death traps, beyond unsafe even at walking speeed, the idea of letting them roam city streets and the countryside even at "a gallop" with two for every house and people using them daily, in 1926, would have created obscene amounts of air pollution and a death toll higher than the worst world wars. Automobiles were improved, now they're only the 12th leading cause of death in the US - by comparison, half as many people die per-capita by automobile (and all transportation) accident in Western Europe. Unfortunately they are still the number one cause of death for Americans aged 13 through 25, but somehow that is still acceptable and we fund all kinds of tax supported infrastructure, bailouts for struggling manufacturers and other societal costs because, apparently, we the people value the convenience and yes: fun, of automobiles in our society that much.
>shit causes more problems than it solves, and is not capable of being used productively.
Yeah... see above, and throw in some notes about how the oil industry did its thing on the global environment, in large part aided and abetted by people's love for their cars and their cars' dependance on oil...
Computer, and now AI/LLM, technology is moving faster still. Alvin Toffler wrote "Future Shock" in 1970 about how societal change was accelerating and the children of the 1960s accepted massive changes and rates of change that their parents struggled to deal with, and that was before computers started having massive direct personal impact in daily life, and AI was just a joke about "telling the computer exactly what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate" in the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka movie.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02, @06:14PM (1 child)
LLM technology is fundamentally unimproveable. No increase in the size of training sets can change the problem of stochiastic, incorrect output. Sorry, "confabulations" if you're trying to present this as unintentional. "Hallucinations" if you're intent on anthromorphizing software. Same with increases in the dimensions of correlation.
https://arxiv.org/html/2401.11817v2 [arxiv.org]
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01781 [arxiv.org]
https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/can-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-be-fixed-experts-doubt-altman-openai/ [fortune.com]
Takeaway quote: “This isn’t fixable...It’s inherent in the mismatch between the technology and the proposed use cases.”
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 02, @09:30PM
I don't give 2 shits about your hypothetical theoretical academical analysis of your own understanding.
What I know is: I sez code, it codez. It codez faster than me, better than me, and it findz mor bugz. It also glazes right through misspellings and gives you what you meant, not what you said.
Is it perfect? No. Will it completely replace human coders? Some, not all. Is it the most significant "coding assist tool" to come along in the last 50 years? Again, I'd say yes. Will people misuse it? Absolutely. Does that mean it's inherently flawed? Absolutely not.
IDEs with built in refactoring tools, compilers with warnings, Google search for examples of what you're trying to do, those were all big jumps forward. Not this big.
12 months ago it couldn't handle big projects, but it was doing small stuff so well it was already significant. Beyond maybe 300 lines of specs it started to get a bit lost at times.
Today, I feel like it starts to get annoyingly bogged down around the point that I have about 30K lines of specification documents - at that level you can turn things around and make simple changes faster than it does, if you've managed to keep some sense of how the code it built works. You can also modularize your system and just have it work on one 30K chunk at a time as long as you can fit reasonable interface specs into those 30K lines of specs.
This time next year, will that be 300K lines of specs? I don't know, but even if the LLMs themselves "aren't getting any better" the experience of using the frontier model based agents has dramatically improved.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]