That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know how to use AI correctly.
The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work.
In general, a good policy towards AI submission really has to primarily address the "good faith" issue; and then explain how much tolerance the project has for vibecoding.
No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them".
AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it.
Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.
The ability to create spam instantly, fitted perfectly to any situation, and doing that 24/7, everywhere, is very different from before. Before, spam was annoying but generally different enough to tell apart. It was also (in general) never too much as to make an entire platform useless.
With AI, the entire internet IS spam. No matter what you google or look at, there's a very high chance it's AI spam. The internet is super duper extra dead.
At least a bunch of lawyers already got hit when their court filings cited hallucinated cases. If this trend continues, I'll not be surprised when some end up disbarred.
AI also generates spam though, so this is a much bigger problem than merely "unreasonable" people alone.
Now, with that said I don't think we're very far from automated agents causing problems all on their own.
This is the technique I've picked up and got the most from over the past few months. I don't give it hard, high-level problems and then review a giant set of changes to figure it out. I give it the technical solution I was already going to implement anyway, and then have it generate the code I otherwise would have written.
It cuts back dramatically on the review fatigue because I already know exactly what I'm expecting to see, so my reviews are primarily focused on the deviations from that.
I also use LLM assistance, and I love it because it helps my ADHD brain get stuff done, but I definitely miss stuff that I wouldn’t miss by myself. It’s usually fairly simple mistakes to fix later but I still miss them initially.
I’ve been having luck with LLM reviewers though.
This is how I've found myself to be productive with the tools, or since productivity is hard to measure, at least it's still a fun way to work. I do not need to type everything but I want a very exact outcome nonetheless.
My simple solution: I use Whisper to transcribe my text, and feed the output to an LLM for cleanup (custom prompt). It's fantastic. Way better than stuff like Dragon. Now I get frustrated with transcribing using Google's default mechanism on Android - so inaccurate!
But the ability to take notes, dictate emails, etc using Whisper + LLM is invaluable. I likely would refuse to work for a company that won't let me put IP into an LLM.
Similarly, I take a lot of notes on paper, and would have to type them up. Tedious and painful. I switched to reading my notes aloud and use the above system to transcribe. Still painful. I recently realized Gemini will do a great job just reading my notes. So now I simply convert my notes to a photo and send to Gemini.
I categorize all my expenses. I have receipts from grocery stores where I highlight items into categories. You can imagine it's painful to enter that into a financial SW. I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me.
All of these are cool applications on their own, but when you realize they're also improving your health ... clear win.
Think of it like random noise in an image editor: you do own the random pixels since they're generated by the computer, but you can still use them as part of making your art - you do not lose copyright to your art because you used a random noise filter.
Which it might. And needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, under current copyright law.
The accessibility angle is really important here. What we need is a way to stop people who make contributions they don't understand and/or can not vouch they are the author for (the license question is very murky still, and no what the US supreme court said doesn't matter here in EU). This is difficult though.
No, it's not that simple. AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed.
This matters for open source projects that care about licensing. It should also matter for proprietary code bases, as anyone can copy and distribute "their" AI generated code for any purpose, including to compete with the "owner".
I agree with you that there's a huge distinction between code that a person understands as thoroughly as if they wrote it, and vibecoded stuff that no person actually understands. but actually doing something practical with that distinction is a difficult problem to solve.
we do often choose automation when possible (especially in computer realms), but there are endless examples in programing and other fields of not-so-surprising-in-retrospect failures due to how automation affects human behavior.
so it's clearly not true. what we're debating is the amount of harm, not if there is any.
This reads almost like satire of an AI power user. Why would you like it when an LLM makes things up? Because you get to write more prompts? Wouldn't it be better if it just didn't do that?
It's like saying "I love getting stuck in traffic because I get to drive longer!"
Sorry but that one sentence really stuck out to me
I like it because I have no expectation of perfection-- out of others, myself, and especially not AI. I expect "good enough" and work upwards from there, and with (most) things, I find AI to be better than good enough.
I understand that your use case is different, so AI may help handicapped people. Nothing wrong with that.
The problem is that the term AI encompasses many things, and a lot of AI led to quality decay. There is a reason why Microsoft is now called Microslop. Personally I'd much prefer for AI to go away. It won't go away, of course, but I still would like to see it gone, even if I agree that the use case you described is objectively useful and better for you (and others who are handicapped).
> I also think it incorrect to look at it from a perspective of "does the good outweigh the bad?". Relevant, yes, but utilitarian arguments often lead to counter-intuitive results and end up amplifying the problems they seek to solve.
That is the same for every technology though. You always have a trade-off. So I don't think the question is incorrect at all - it applies the same just as it is for any other technology, too. I also disagree that utilitarian arguments by their intrinsic nature lead to counter-intuitive results. Which result would be counter-intuitive when you analyse a technology for its pros and cons?
I'm much better now after tons of rehab work (no surgery, thankfully), but I don't have the stamina to type as much as I used to. I was always a heavy IDE user and a very fast coder, but I've moved platforms too many times and lost my muscle memory. A year ago I found the AI tools to be basically time-wasters, but now I can be as productive as before without incurring significant pain.
Given the liabilities of relying on public and chat users markdown data to sell to other users without compensation raises a number of issues:
1. Copyright: LLM generated content can't be assigned copyright (USA), and thus may contaminate licensing agreements. It is likely public-domain, but also may conflict with GPL/LGPL when stolen IP bleeds through weak obfuscation. The risk has zero precedent cases so far (the Disney case slightly differs), but is likely a legal liability waiting to surface eventually.
2. Workmanship: All software is terrible, but some of it is useful. People that don't care about black-box obfuscated generated content, are also a maintenance and security liability. Seriously, folks should just retire if they can't be arsed to improve readable source tree structure.
3. Repeatability: As the models started consuming other LLM content, the behavioral vectors often also change the content output. Humans know when they don't know something, but an LLM will inject utter random nonsense every time. More importantly, the energy cost to get that error rate lower balloons exponentially.
4. Psychology: People do not think critically when something seems right 80% of the time. The LLM accuracy depends mostly on stealing content, but it stops working when there is nothing left to commit theft of service on. The web is now >53% slop and growing. Only the human user chat data is worth stealing now.
5. Manipulation: The frequency of bad bots AstroTurf forums with poisoned discourse is biasing the delusional. Some react emotionally instead of engaging the community in good faith, or shill hard for their cult of choice.
6. Sustainability: FOSS like all ecosystems is vulnerable to peer review exhaustion like the recent xz CVE fiasco. The LLM hidden hostile agent problem is currently impossible to solve, and thus cannot be trusted in hostile environments.
7. Ethics: Every LLM ruined town economic simulations, nuked humanity 94% of the time in every war game, and encouraged the delusional to kill IRL
While I am all for assistive technologies like better voice recognition, TTS, and individuals computer-user interfaces. Most will draw a line at slop code, and branch to a less chaotic source tree to work on.
I think it is hilarious some LLM proponents immediately assume everyone also has no clue how these models are implemented. =3
"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator "
It is a bit insulting, but I get that these issues are important and people feel like the stakes are sky-high: job loss, misallocation of resources, enshitification, increased social stratification, abrogation of personal responsibility, runaway corporate irresponsibility, amplification of bad actors, and just maybe that `p(doom)` is way higher than AI-optimists are willing to consider. Especially as AI makes advances into warfare, justice, and surveillance.
Even if you think AI is great, it's easy to acknowledge that all it may take is zealotry and the rot within politics to turn it into a disaster. You're absolutely right to identify that there are some eerie similarities to the "gun's don't kill people, people kill people" line of thinking.
There IS a lot to grapple with. However, I disagree with these conclusions (so far) and especially that AI is a unique danger to humanity. I also disagree that AI in any form is our salvation and going to elevate humanity to unfathomable heights (or anything close to that).
But, to bring it back to this specific topic, I think OSS projects stand to benefit (increasingly so as improvements continue) from AI and should avoid taking hardline stances against it.
I do agree that at large, the theoretical upsides of accessibility are almost certainly completely overshadowed by obvious downsides of AI. At least, for now anyway. Accessibility is a single instance of the general argument that "of course there are major upsides to using AI", and there a good chance the future only gets brighter.
My point, essentially, is that I think this is (yet another) area in life where you can't solve the problem by saying "don't do it", and enforcing it is cost-prohibitive. Saying "no AI!" isn't going to stop PR spam. It's not going to stop slop code. What is it going to stop (see edit)? "Bad" people won't care, and "good" people (who use/depend-on AI) will contribute less.
Thus I think we need to focus on developing robust systems around integrating AI. Certainly I'd love to see people adopt responsible disclosure policies as a starting point.
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[edit] -- To answer some of my own question, there are obvious legal concerns that frequently come up. I have my opinions, but as in many legal matters, especially around IP, the water is murky and opinions are strongly held at both extremes and all to often having to fight a legal battle at all* is immediately a loss regardless of outcome.
You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. I'd say that that is downplaying and misrepreting the issue. You even go so far to say
>Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place.
These aren't balanced arguments taking both sides into considerations. It's a decision that your mindset is the only right one and anyone else is a opposing progress.
No, literally, he didn't.
At least in the US, society has been well on it's way to collapse before the LLM came out. "Fake news" is a great example of this.
>It's a decision that your mindset is the only right one and anyone else is a opposing progress.
So pretty much every religious group that's ever existed for any amount of time. Fundamentalism is totally unproblematic, right?
IMO you can blame this on ML and the ability to microtarget[1] constituencies with propaganda that's been optimized, workshopped, focus grouped, etc to death.
Proto-AI got us there, LLMs are an accelerator in the same direction.
But as modern society is, it is simply accelerating the low trust factors of it and collapsing jobs (even if it can't do them yet), because that's what was already happening. But hey, assets also accelerated up. For now.
>So pretty much every religious group that's ever existed for any amount of time. Fundamentalism is totally unproblematic, right?
Religion is a very interesting factor. I have many thoughts on it, but for now I'll just say that a good 95% of religious devouts utterly fail at following what their relevant scriptures say to do. We can extrapolate the meaning of that in so many ways from there.
I think the ugly unspoken truth whether Mozilla or Debian or someone else, is that there are going to be plausible and valuable use cases and that AI as a paradigm is going to be a hard problem the same way that presiding over, say, a justice system is a hard problem (stay with me). What I mean is it can have a legitimate purpose but be prone to abuse and it's a matter of building in institutional safeguards and winning people's trust while never fully being able to eliminate risk.
It's easy for someone to roll their eyes at the idea that there's utility but accessibility is perfect and clear-eyed use case, that makes it harder to simply default to hedonic skepticism against any and all AI applications. I actually think it could have huge implications for leveling the playing field in the browser wars for my particular pet issue.