@ProdigalFrog
> “Pretending to have a “neutral stance” when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.”Bars. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision, I hope Antoine gets to keep his peace undisturbed.
Fascism is when people can use AI.
Not on its own, but an unfortunate goal of fascism is ruining education so that people have opinions like yours
So you agree with me, that AI is not fascist, but at the same time you say that one of goals of fascism is for people to think that AI is not fascist.
Am I reading it right?
You are, in fact, not reading that right.
Let me spell it for you because you apparently fell victim to the previously mentioned attack on education: AI is a tool. Like any tool it is not inherently evil, but the fascists love to take potentially useful tools and turn them around to cause as much suffering as possible. In this case, AI (more specifically LLMs) is used to make people reliant on it by getting them addicted to outsourcing all their problem solving skills while also reducing the value of art and artists of all types so they can take the money that artists would have made and also control ‘art’ (can’t have any pesky artists drawing pictures of people beating the nazis up) all the while sucking up every single data point about you.
If that’s all too complicated for you to understand, I guess you could over simplify it as “fascism is when AI”
Does that mean internet is fascist? Search engines? Calculators? Writing?
All of those things outsource your congnitive skills.
Almost nobody is saying that AI art generation is a complete subsitute for conventional art.
Even if all of that were true, it wouldn’t make AI fascist, but totalitarian.
Acting as if using an LLM is similar to using a calculator or search engine is a ridiculous comparison and further proves it’s not worth engaging with you further
The world needs more people that act on principles and take a stance.
Weird that he didn’t care when Linus Torvalds adopted basically the same policy to the kernel that serves as the foundation of the main Debian distribution. I have an inkling that there is more going on at Debian, not LLM use alone.
didn’t he? have you checked?
the main thing is that it’s an upstream problem. the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles. if you want to stay on that kernel you have to take what you are given. in your own organisation you can at least try to change things.
the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles
source:
“AI scrapers break the web, to use this page you’ll need JavaScript enabled.”
The ironic…
The point isn’t so much the quality of the code itself.
The point is that AI is an inefficient power-wasting piece of trash, and the data centres that power it have significant negative impacts on people and the environment, all for the sake of devs being lazy idiots. And you’d have to be an idiot to let AI take away your skills.
The point is also that this is the pre-enshittification version of AI, and any person or system foolish enough to become dependent on it will get exploited to the best of AI companies’ abilities.
pre-enshittification?
Then what the hell are the models Windows is relying on if this is the GOOD stuff?
the opposite of “enshittified” isn’t “good.” some stuff sucks for fresh, new reasons before it enshittifies and turns to full on exploitative rent-seeking.
for example, anthropic quietly pulled claude code from their pro subscriptions and made it a separate subscription. that’s enshittification. and stupid AI bros are gonna fall for it every time.
Oh so it just goes from bad to worse? I see then
Usually in the context of profit milking by shareholders influencing that decline.
The point isn’t so much the speed and comfort of the commute itself.
The point is that a car is an inefficient power-wasting piece of trash, and the oil rigs that power it have significant negative impacts on people and the environment, all for the sake of commuters being lazy idiots. And you’d have to be an idiot to let a car take away your mobility.
Upvoted with the hope that you’re not trying to be ironic
This but unironically
Respect to Antoine. Having principles that are worth a damn is a rare trait amongst developers these days.
Well what would the disclosure requirement improve? It’s unenforceable and it just gets in the way of evaluating the code based on quality. Every code should have high standards. Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.
If a project allows llm contributions then disclosing it will only make people wary of the wrong things. Putting a badge on it is not helpful anymore if it’s allowed. I have seen good llm code and bad human code.
The Free Software Foundation of Europe recently published an article detailing why it’s legally quite important for developers to disclose and carefully catalog which code was created by LLMs.
https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html
Recommendations for AI usage in Free Software contributions
With these issues in mind, the recently published Recommendations When Using LLM-Backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions by the SFC outlines some of the legal difficulties for copyright and licensing that generative systems have created for software developers who wish to write, maintain, or contribute to Free Software projects.
Notably for the purposes of this article, the SFC recommends the full recording and disclosure of how and when an AI tool was used to assist in the creation of a contribution. As stated by the SFC:
“FOSS project leaders cannot make good decisions about LLM-gen-AI policy if they cannot survey which contributions were assisted, and how much they are assisted. Part of the contribution process should (at least) include a disclosure of what LLM-gen-AI system was used, its version (as these system change over time), and a brief description of how the system assisted the contributor. This information should be included in a machine-readable format in commit logs."
Indeed, such disclosure can be an important foundational step to allow for the accurate assessment of the copyrightability of code that has been assisted or generated by AI tools, in order to assess their licensability into Free Software. Open and clear disclosure is a helpful step for the Free Software community to maintain a healthy licensing ecosystem, which is currently threatened by the legal uncertainties that come with the advent of generative AI.
Additionally, it is worthwhile for developers to document in some capacity the extent of human work that they have done in their software projects, whether it be the writing of code, the selection and arrangement of components within the project, or the extent of human modification of machine generated content.
IANAL but from my naive perspective it might make more sense to not disclose this because no one can prove that something was written by AI if no one discloses it. That means for me that any claims that a certain part cannot be copyrighted are hard or even impossible to make.
The without disclosure part tells everything you need to know here. If it’s such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that? In an open source Community shouldn’t everything like that be known?
I wonder what’s the reason to make it optional? I think I’ve seen this approach with other projects as well. Isn’t transparency and accountability a good thing? Also, this kind of information helps immensely when reading pull requests or silly bug reports. And Debian acknowledge there might be licensing issues. So it might become some sort of liability to them once it taints everything and we can’t even tell?! So why? What’s the upside? Adorn oneself with borrowed plumes and not being forced to disclose the fact? Or too much bookkeeping?
Because the idea is to judge the code by its quality, not by who or what wrote it.
I think that’s a commendable effort. Usually I do it the same way. Just feels massively unfair to me towards human contributors. I’ve seen the AI pull requests and bugreports come in. And it’s very time consuming to deal with them. They’re long, convoluted, touch a lot of code… There’s frequently a good amount of “hallucinations” in them, because they’re sent in autonomously or by people who don’t know what they’re doing. There might be dozens of them in quick succession as with the larger projects. They eat up time and effort which is now missing to deal with human contributions or wishes. My own opinion is: Transparency would help a lot to prioritize stuff. I mean AI isn’t sentient, and as long as that holds true, I’d rather treat people with respect and the amount of attention they deserve… (In contrast to a level playing field between human and machine… Because the machines will easily beat us by sheer volume.)
True, but I think the kind of people who send those monster PRs either already have AIs cosign it or they aren’t reading the policy anyway. There have also been a number of studies that show LLMs usually ignore this kind of instruction.
Hmmh. Sure. People also deliberately instruct their agents not to reveal the fact. I can empathize with that, because there’s all these people out there yelling at you, and launching shit storms.
I believe the uptake in “co-authored by …” is due to some companies making it the default setting in their frameworks. It’s to some degree Microsoft being nice to us, not necessarily benevolence of the people sending in those PRs. Doesn’t really matter to me though. It’s enough to make me happy if that’s attached to some commit or PR. I don’t care how it got there, as long as it fits the purpose.
Edit: And thanks for your comment. I don’t think I agree. Nonetheless this might be the answer to my question.
There are so many levels of LLM involvement and once you make this distinction you actually have to devote some of your limited resources to define and enforce it. So I think it might not be strictly beneficial, but possibly also have downsides.
Where would you draw the line at which point it counts as LLM involvement? Having one run as some sort of spell/syntax checker? Doing some research (and being influenced by it) before hand coding something? Having it create a working prototype and then reimplementing it by hand? If you use code from somewhere else to solve a problem and ai use has not been disclosed for this code, do you automatically have to assume LLM usage was involved or is there plausible deniability?
I think in the end you’d have to use too many resources check it and debate where the line is drawn, when the real question is how you retain human knowledge and engagement within your community.
Just disclose how you used it.
“Just” like with GDPR, “just” follow the rules for personal data management. In reality, compliance stuff like that is expensive to implement.
So if you are going to require it, don’t pretend it is without cost. Which is exactly what you seem to be doing.
We saw this play out with GMO foods:
If it’s such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that?
later:
It’s specifically labelled, therefore it must be bad right? If we didn’t need to worry about it, it wouldn’t be labelled.
In the us anyway the food is labeled as bio-engineered, and everyone still buys it
Conversely… if it’s so benign, why should it have a label?
Not really worth discussing - it’s not benign, and it can be made purposefully not benign by a third party without notification or knowledge. A third party who has already demonstrated a penchant for world domination, both technologically and physically.
Code in general is proven not to be benign
Excuse you my code doesn’t even compile properly, so it can not be malign by definition.
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
I mean, I would think, at least. It seems to me that most of the people in charge of big projects are usually FOSS purists.
That’s part of the reason why AI scrapers are breaking the small web. FOSS purists really have no significant defense against it aside from Anubis.
Real DoS protection comes from capacity, which costs serious dollars, especially in this day and age where botfarms can be hired by the hour for rather cheap and record-breaking attacks seem to happen like monthly.
The alternative is using a CDN, but there are none that align with FOSS ideals. And for CDNs to be really effective, you need them to break open TLS and handle the decrypted traffic, which raises privacy concerns on top.
But anyways…most license agreements would make it a requirement that if you’re using an open-source model, that it be properly attributed, right?
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
Most developers who use these tools (even FLOSS developers) appear to be using the corporate owned models that were definitely trained on both proprietary source code and code that is incompatible with the GPL license. Some EU courts have also already judged that LLM code cannot be copyrighted, which also means it cannot be licensed as GPL.
Currently, all code generated with an LLM has a 3 to 10% chance of unknowingly plagiarizing the copyrighted code it was trained on, and any FLOSS project that uses it is making a huge gamble that their codebase won’t be scanned by corporations in the future looking for violations to sue about, shut down rival FLOSS projects, etc.
So Open-Source and FOSS projects collectively decided that they want to jump on half-sunken ship in the middle of the ocean?
Amazing.
Is it a half sunken ship? I’ve been following AI in software for a while now, even though all signs point to failure and a crash, it just keeps going and people adopt it more.
Hot take: LLMs is the best thing has happened to open source movement:
- software copyright is defeated and basically eliminated in practice
- reverse engineering is so accessible that proprietary protocols cannot be hidden and can be reimplemented by AI agents as free software
- open weight LLMs are incredibly competitive and run on general hardware
- linux is de facto winner in all computing and rising in desktop and gaming niches
We’re literally in the golden age of free software
You’re conflating open source and free software with public domain. Open source software licenses are completely dependent on software copyright. This means that if software copyright were eliminated, open source licenses would become completely unenforceable. We may be headed in this direction anyway, but I just thought I would make the point.
It has been wild to see Linux users hope that the GPL is rendered unenforceable.
Why? The entire purpose of GPL is to counteract copyright. If there is no copyright we no longer need GPL either.
The GPL gives you the right to access and modify the source code of software you use. A lack of copyrights does not mean that the creators have to share the source code with you. In fact, it means that anyone can take GPL software and turn it into closed source software
@fruitcantfly @drmoose Just. Wrong. Clearly ‘Linux boosted’ is a worthless accolade.
Fascism is when AI.
How is AI fascist?
Is it ultranationalist? Rejecting democracy? Anticommunist or antiliberal? Third position in economics? Anti egalitarian? Racist? Traditianolist socially?
I could maybe see an argument for it being anti egalitarian, but besides that, LLMs have none of those traits.
You don’t understand… ‘fascism’ today means something along the lines of ‘I don’t like it’, like ‘gay’ in the 90s…
Looks like I better start learning OpenBSD ASAP. I really like my distro of choice, but if the distro it’s based off of is shooting itself in the foot, I have to switch over massive ethical concerns!
Second I find out I can put a second drive in my desktop, I plan on using it to learn to make something a lot less hostile to the actual people helping develop the OS. And OpenBSD sounds like a fun choice for now… at least until I find they have started betraying the actual people.
If you’re worried about LLM generated code you better stop using computers altogether.
I’d rather spend my time using technology to spread the word that the creatures who use genAI can become human again through reeducation against genAI. Sounds much more productive.
Good, someone with morals
If they had those, they wouldn’t be wasting electricity by being on the Internet. Causing global warming with their use of technology. They’d be sitting in a cave, meditating to reduce the harm they cause to the environment.
Yet you use a computer, curious! I am very intelligent.
You, too? Nice! That makes two intelligent people.
Want to do something really intelligent together? Like try to enforce a ban on AI even though it’s use is undetectable and fundamentally it’s just math?
you not being able to detect LLM use is not our problem
That’s a false equivalence. And besides they polute on massivelly different scales
I’m not an AI evangelist but I am open-minded. I think Debian’s decision is balanced, and more importantly realistic.
There’s a difference between vibe coding and using AI to improve productivity. I’m a dev and pretty much everyone I know is using AI in some way. Yes they’ll lose contributors initially but Debian would lose more in the long run if they’d outright banned it.
For all those who are saying ‘AI supports fascists’ - the most popular models right now are Chinese. Very oppressive and paranoid government but definitely not fascist.
For all those that say ‘AI causes global warming’ - you’re correct, but unless you’ve got your own solar panels, so does your non-AI gaming rig. And your gas-driven car.
Also, a ban without control isn’t a ban. And making sure that not a single line of code was writen with the help of some AI seems more than complicated… is it just possible?
And how much working time would it take to audit all packages to make sure it is 100% wrote by some human?
It seems more realistic (and more honnest) to allow the part that would not be found by a reasonable audit of the code.
Agreed. I think they should have pushed for stronger disclosure requirements, but I also realise that isn’t actually enforceable.
I also find it very telling that people will talk about the negative parts of AI, but not acknowledge other automation tools that perpetuate the same problems. My experience is that most people’s complaints have a real basis, but they are just mis-diagnosed.
The problems seem to be our economic and societal structures, and AI is the new fancy tool that exacerbates those problems. But I’ve not heard a good reason why AI itself is that problem.
I disagree. You are an AI evangelist and quite closed-minded. Having a “balanced” approach, if there was one, would be to label any AI usage explicitly. If you’re afraid to label your AI usage, you’re a fucking coward.
But, damn, let’s not blame the billion dollar data centers for global warming, guys! It’s the individual decisions you make every day that kills the planet! If you believe this, the AI has fried your brain. It’s not one authoritarian government, it’s a different one! Actual paste-eating behavior. My work has improved with LLM usage! A common saying from people who were not good at their job, and are somehow now worse without them realizing it.
Any decent developer I have found has hated LLMs because they do not work anywhere near as well as people who are shit at things think they do. Personally, I don’t really like smashing the Skinner Box button hoping the output works this time because I like programming, and having Claude rape my codebase seems like a bad idea to me if I ever want to go back in there. But, then again, I like knowing how my code works, so maybe I should just lobotomize myself and I’ll understand why you like it so much.
Wow. You know, it is possible to have a discussion and even disagree with people without being a nasty peice of work?
I don’t have discussions with people that think the problem behind LLMs with high energy and water usage is that people use cars too much. Literally no one wants to subsidize their fucking local data center. Plus, you definitely ALSO use a car, so you’re not even better than the people you are trying to criticize because ChatGPT has rotted that portion of your brain from disuse. Frankly, I’ll be a nasty piece of work if it gets it through your thick fucking skull that AI is shit, most people know it’s shit, and you are likely shittier at everything you do using it. But, sure, complain about my tone, and never my message, because all you AI bros get so fucking butthurt by anyone saying anything bad about AI. Just call me a Luddite already or whatever and then go cry in your AI discord.
I don’t have discussions with people that think the problem behind LLMs with high energy and water usage
I didn’t say I didn’t think that was a problem, I was highlighting the hypocracy around it all.
Plus, you definitely ALSO use a car
Actually I dont. I dont own or use a car. My primary mode of transport is my own two legs.
so you’re not even better than the people you are trying to criticize
I didn’t say I was, you’re drawing conclusions based on what I haven’t said.
Frankly, I’ll be a nasty piece of work if it gets it through your thick fucking skull that AI is shit, most people know it’s shit, and you are likely shittier at everything you do using it.
You seem to think you’re some hero and doing the world a favour but you’re behaving like an opinionated bully. You are by far the vilest person I have encountered on here.
Even if every single fucking person on earth stopped driving their fucking car, global warming wouldn’t fucking stop because the vast majority of it is corporations’ fault, and those data centers are a major contributor to that. But subsidizing your lack of carbon footprint by using an LLM is a weird fucking flex, I guess. You were the one that brought up how using an LLM is like using a car, so sounds like you do care about that. But, sure, highlight the major pollution issues and not the fucking over poor people who have to subsidize your LLMs water and energy usage. My car didn’t make you pay double for your water bill like an asshole.
very oppressive and paranoid, bit definitely not fascist.
That is … an interesting take, especially taking the Uyghur genocide into account.
Not a genocide. No mass killings. Pure propaganda pushed by a CIA plant named Adrian Zenz. (You should look into him; he’s a religious zealot who believes his Agency-promoted investigation is a mission from God.) The UN’s own report from 2022 never uses the word genocide. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/08/1125932
It is an anti-radicalization education program put in place because the CIA was arming and training groups of Uyghurs with the intent of creating terrorist cells, just like they’ve done in bunches of other countries.
The word “genocide” should never be used lightly. What Israel is doing to the people of occupied Palestine? That’s a genocide.
