7 ms·

Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

51 points by jwilk 2y ago

MR4D 2y ago
I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to submit some background artwork that is created by AI. Man, slippery slope!!
- MR4D 2y ago
  Not sure why this got voted down. It was an honest question. Gentoo said no AI contributions. Artwork is a contribution, and someone will use AI to do it. I’m just pointing out that this will actually be hard to enforce, and I think someone will test it sooner rather than later. Artwork would be the obvious vector to do that, and I wonder how long before someone tries it.
  - Lockal 2y ago
    (I did not downvote and can't even do it), but Gentoo does not accept art contributions of any kind (human/ai), there is just no place for this. But in previous discussion[1] somebody mentioned that pkgxdev/pantry[2] generated image for RabbitMQ - "gloriously bonkers", I recovered the image from web archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20240419091549/https://gui.tea.xyz/prod/rabbitmq.com/1024x1024.webp https://web.archive.org/web/20240419091549/https://gui.tea.x... . I guess I'll refrain from explaining what's wrong here.... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038372 [2] https://github.com/pkgxdev/pantry/issues/5358 https://github.com/pkgxdev/pantry/issues/5358
    - MR4D 2y ago
      Thanks for that. This is exactly what I meant - it’s extraordinarily hard to police, even though I agree with the sentiment.
    - throwaway7356 2y ago
      > Gentoo does not accept art contributions of any kind (human/ai), there is just no place for this. Okay, let's do a short fact check on that: 1. Visit https://gentoo.org https://gentoo.org, notice logo in top left: a first sign of contributed art. 2. But wait, what is this? https://www.gentoo.org/inside-gentoo/artwork/ https://www.gentoo.org/inside-gentoo/artwork/ A full page of contributed artwork and a box titled "Contribute artwork". > I guess I'll refrain from explaining what's wrong here.... Seems reasonable.
fire_lake 2y ago
Interesting thread. I doubt they could tell reliably if AI tools are used though.
- lucb1e 2y 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"
- xyst 2y ago
  There are some cases where you can kind of tell but yea it’s a crap shoot. Any it’s all based on intuition. Artwork, yea it’s kind of easy - “kid in photo has 10 fingers on one hand”. But for text, especially code or technical documentation. I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell.
  - Xenoamorphous 2y ago
    If no one is able to tell, does it matter?
    - lucb1e 2y 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 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compiled_(1989) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compile...
xyst 2y ago
Seems more like contributors will continue to use AI tools but won’t 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
- lucb1e 2y 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 2y 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.
    - ToucanLoucan 2y 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jl6 2y 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...
CuriouslyC 2y ago
This is only gonna hurt Gentoo. They're not Ubuntu, they have no market power.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  They seem to have been managing just fine in past years without AI contributions, why would it suddenly be any different?
  - CuriouslyC 2y 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
brezelgoring 2y ago
I see many saying that contributors will continue using AI/ML tools clandestinely, but I’d 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 “I will do what I will do and if you don’t like it I’ll take my things and go elsewhere”. I don’t accept that any adult, let alone a professional developer would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. What’s the gain? Who would they be trying to impress? Let’s 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? That’s 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 don’t 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 brain’s. If I need long, repetitive code made, I’ve 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 2y ago
  > would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. [...] 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 don’t 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
pipeline_peak 2y ago
Only as long as they know it’s AI-created
hnbear 2y ago
Given Gentoo is a non-corporate, all volunteer project I think this is the salient point: “ In his RFC, he laid out three broad areas of concern: copyrights, quality, and ethics. On the copyright front, he argued that LLMs are trained on copyrighted material and the companies behind them are unconcerned with copyright violations. "In particular, there's a good risk that these tools would yield stuff we can't legally use." “ Unlike Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, who all are corporate organizations with support revenue and legal teams to defend these issues, along with policy to prevent the issues, Gentoo is an all volunteer project that doesn’t have the organizational or financial support to fight legal battles. Their risk from copyright legal issues is much higher.
barfbagginus 2y ago
Without AI, I struggle with dyslexia and writing difficulties. With AI, I can contribute good code, with well written requirements spec, test plan, unit tests, documentation, and automation. I spend about ten hours a week working on open source, when before I spent none. When I see an anti AI take that dismisses the potential and makes unlikely legal handwringing, I realize how much work is left in making open source accessible to those who struggle like I do. I won't be contributing to Gentoo or any project that rejects AI assisted work. I'll keep working on my own accessibility projects and my own computational geometry codes. I believe that in the end, accessibly focused projects will win the day here. AI assisted open source will become the norm, because it lowers the access barriers to good code.
- janosdebugs 2y ago
  As helpful as it may be, AI can emit verbatim training data where the training data for the particular issue is scarce. I have, unfortunately, seen it myself in an interview take-home assignment where the solution for a particular sub-problem was 1:1 copied from a seemingly obscure chinese blog and had a completely different coding style than the rest. (The rest also had numerous inconsistencies and the solution had AI written all over it.) For an open source project inadvertently accepting something like that may spell legal trouble long after the original contributor disappeared, so until the legal status of AI-generated code is clarified in court, there are good reasons to ask contributors to limit themselves or completely forego using an AI assistant.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    I'd be curious about the problem and context that elicited the verbatim output. Did it have detailed descriptions of a real system in production that you were supposed to extend, including API docs and other system specific elements? Or was it a generic homework assignment? If it's emitting verbatim solutions in my context, that is surprising. I write up custom requirements, have a conversation with a two sided critique and requirement negotiation and gap analysis vs the exist system. I then generate and critique a test plan, generate stub tests and stub implementations in line with existing code, then implement and test the stories by hand on top of that. Nothing that "has AI written all over it" gets generated, since we're having a custom conversation and arriving at custom solutions. If it does copy public but not open code, it's tiny generic snippets or, design patterns, rather than, say, sophisticated algorithms.. not anything likely to cause damage to another org or it's market position. I'm prepared to field a cease and desist or put down a lawsuit by yanking affected code. And I'm only going to do this for projects that I own, or whose authors are taking a permissive stance. I'm boycotting any project taking a hard line against AI. My projects are affected in the case of a full retroactive AI ban that makes all AI generated codes unlawful. However, due to the transformative nature of processes like mine, and the vast majority of AI output, I really doubt that'll happen. I'll grant that for a Linux distribution, the risk is much higher - Linux most definitely impacts market positions, and yoinking someone's public blog code could lead to rework after a cease and desist. But even there, I feel the legal risk is symbolic rather than existential or even eminent. Legal risk won't be a driver for most projects, and might not be the driver for gentoo. It'll be prejudice against people who can't easily contribute without AI assistance. There's certainly an element of that in the gentoo discussion, with AI contributions being misrepresented, discounted and dismissed outright. That'll prove short-sighted, and drive contribution to inclusive projects with strong controls ensuring their AI use is responsible and transformative. I wish Gentoo would choose to be an example of that. And I'm sad to say I plan to boycott it until it changes stance. But I am sure other distributions will step up here and work to mitigate the legal risks in return for the obvious accessibility benefits.
zvr 2y ago
Good. Explicit is better than implicit (or implied). Documenting the decision and making it clear is probably better for everybody -- both those who agree and those who disagree. Lots of other projects also have reached the same decision, but the way of communicating this has not been clear. I suppose people with better wordsmithing skills than me will eventually end up with a more-or-less standardized expression to be included in the CONTRIBUTING file. From the point of view of contributors, the situation is a little clearer. In the current situation, using most generative AI tools to produce content essentially stops me from being able to sign a DCO or a CLA to contribute this content, since they both say "I certify that I wrote this" and I can't claim that any longer.
sazz 2y ago
I think this policy is yet another example of ethical overengineering. Yes, of course, ChatGPT & Co. are very unlikely to take any real care about what they give their models to learn - especially with regard to copyright. For a better perspective, I always try to transfer the behavior to the analog world. In this sense, someone who, for example, illegally obtains a book on Linux (let's say via ebook) would not be ethically in the correct position to contribute to Gentoo, because the knowledge on which their contribution is based would be stolen intellectual property. I can't imagine that there are any people in this world whose knowledge was obtained exclusively through copyright legal means. We are all in a gray area - one possibly more than the other. In my view, it is typical of engineers to simply transfer philosophically complicated moral issues to technologies. But this method will never come close to solving anything, because the very complicated analog moral world cannot simply be mapped to 0 or 1.

51 points by jwilk 2y ago

MR4D 2y ago

I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to submit some background artwork that is created by AI. Man, slippery slope!!

MR4D 2y ago
Not sure why this got voted down. It was an honest question. Gentoo said no AI contributions. Artwork is a contribution, and someone will use AI to do it. I’m just pointing out that this will actually be hard to enforce, and I think someone will test it sooner rather than later. Artwork would be the obvious vector to do that, and I wonder how long before someone tries it.
- Lockal 2y ago
  (I did not downvote and can't even do it), but Gentoo does not accept art contributions of any kind (human/ai), there is just no place for this. But in previous discussion[1] somebody mentioned that pkgxdev/pantry[2] generated image for RabbitMQ - "gloriously bonkers", I recovered the image from web archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20240419091549/https://gui.tea.xyz/prod/rabbitmq.com/1024x1024.webp https://web.archive.org/web/20240419091549/https://gui.tea.x... . I guess I'll refrain from explaining what's wrong here.... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038372 [2] https://github.com/pkgxdev/pantry/issues/5358 https://github.com/pkgxdev/pantry/issues/5358
  - MR4D 2y ago
    Thanks for that. This is exactly what I meant - it’s extraordinarily hard to police, even though I agree with the sentiment.
  - throwaway7356 2y ago
    > Gentoo does not accept art contributions of any kind (human/ai), there is just no place for this. Okay, let's do a short fact check on that: 1. Visit https://gentoo.org https://gentoo.org, notice logo in top left: a first sign of contributed art. 2. But wait, what is this? https://www.gentoo.org/inside-gentoo/artwork/ https://www.gentoo.org/inside-gentoo/artwork/ A full page of contributed artwork and a box titled "Contribute artwork". > I guess I'll refrain from explaining what's wrong here.... Seems reasonable.

fire_lake 2y ago

Interesting thread. I doubt they could tell reliably if AI tools are used though.

lucb1e 2y 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"
xyst 2y ago
There are some cases where you can kind of tell but yea it’s a crap shoot. Any it’s all based on intuition. Artwork, yea it’s kind of easy - “kid in photo has 10 fingers on one hand”. But for text, especially code or technical documentation. I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell.
- Xenoamorphous 2y ago
  If no one is able to tell, does it matter?
  - lucb1e 2y 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 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compiled_(1989) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compile...

xyst 2y ago

Seems more like contributors will continue to use AI tools but won’t 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

lucb1e 2y 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 2y 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.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jl6 2y 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...

CuriouslyC 2y ago

This is only gonna hurt Gentoo. They're not Ubuntu, they have no market power.

DaSHacka 2y ago
They seem to have been managing just fine in past years without AI contributions, why would it suddenly be any different?
- CuriouslyC 2y 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

brezelgoring 2y ago

I see many saying that contributors will continue using AI/ML tools clandestinely, but I’d 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 “I will do what I will do and if you don’t like it I’ll take my things and go elsewhere”. I don’t accept that any adult, let alone a professional developer would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. What’s the gain? Who would they be trying to impress? Let’s 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? That’s 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 don’t 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 brain’s. If I need long, repetitive code made, I’ve 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 2y ago
> would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. [...] 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 don’t 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

pipeline_peak 2y ago

Only as long as they know it’s AI-created

hnbear 2y ago

Given Gentoo is a non-corporate, all volunteer project I think this is the salient point: “ In his RFC, he laid out three broad areas of concern: copyrights, quality, and ethics. On the copyright front, he argued that LLMs are trained on copyrighted material and the companies behind them are unconcerned with copyright violations. "In particular, there's a good risk that these tools would yield stuff we can't legally use." “ Unlike Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, who all are corporate organizations with support revenue and legal teams to defend these issues, along with policy to prevent the issues, Gentoo is an all volunteer project that doesn’t have the organizational or financial support to fight legal battles. Their risk from copyright legal issues is much higher.

barfbagginus 2y ago

Without AI, I struggle with dyslexia and writing difficulties. With AI, I can contribute good code, with well written requirements spec, test plan, unit tests, documentation, and automation. I spend about ten hours a week working on open source, when before I spent none. When I see an anti AI take that dismisses the potential and makes unlikely legal handwringing, I realize how much work is left in making open source accessible to those who struggle like I do. I won't be contributing to Gentoo or any project that rejects AI assisted work. I'll keep working on my own accessibility projects and my own computational geometry codes. I believe that in the end, accessibly focused projects will win the day here. AI assisted open source will become the norm, because it lowers the access barriers to good code.

janosdebugs 2y ago
As helpful as it may be, AI can emit verbatim training data where the training data for the particular issue is scarce. I have, unfortunately, seen it myself in an interview take-home assignment where the solution for a particular sub-problem was 1:1 copied from a seemingly obscure chinese blog and had a completely different coding style than the rest. (The rest also had numerous inconsistencies and the solution had AI written all over it.) For an open source project inadvertently accepting something like that may spell legal trouble long after the original contributor disappeared, so until the legal status of AI-generated code is clarified in court, there are good reasons to ask contributors to limit themselves or completely forego using an AI assistant.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  I'd be curious about the problem and context that elicited the verbatim output. Did it have detailed descriptions of a real system in production that you were supposed to extend, including API docs and other system specific elements? Or was it a generic homework assignment? If it's emitting verbatim solutions in my context, that is surprising. I write up custom requirements, have a conversation with a two sided critique and requirement negotiation and gap analysis vs the exist system. I then generate and critique a test plan, generate stub tests and stub implementations in line with existing code, then implement and test the stories by hand on top of that. Nothing that "has AI written all over it" gets generated, since we're having a custom conversation and arriving at custom solutions. If it does copy public but not open code, it's tiny generic snippets or, design patterns, rather than, say, sophisticated algorithms.. not anything likely to cause damage to another org or it's market position. I'm prepared to field a cease and desist or put down a lawsuit by yanking affected code. And I'm only going to do this for projects that I own, or whose authors are taking a permissive stance. I'm boycotting any project taking a hard line against AI. My projects are affected in the case of a full retroactive AI ban that makes all AI generated codes unlawful. However, due to the transformative nature of processes like mine, and the vast majority of AI output, I really doubt that'll happen. I'll grant that for a Linux distribution, the risk is much higher - Linux most definitely impacts market positions, and yoinking someone's public blog code could lead to rework after a cease and desist. But even there, I feel the legal risk is symbolic rather than existential or even eminent. Legal risk won't be a driver for most projects, and might not be the driver for gentoo. It'll be prejudice against people who can't easily contribute without AI assistance. There's certainly an element of that in the gentoo discussion, with AI contributions being misrepresented, discounted and dismissed outright. That'll prove short-sighted, and drive contribution to inclusive projects with strong controls ensuring their AI use is responsible and transformative. I wish Gentoo would choose to be an example of that. And I'm sad to say I plan to boycott it until it changes stance. But I am sure other distributions will step up here and work to mitigate the legal risks in return for the obvious accessibility benefits.

zvr 2y ago

Good. Explicit is better than implicit (or implied). Documenting the decision and making it clear is probably better for everybody -- both those who agree and those who disagree. Lots of other projects also have reached the same decision, but the way of communicating this has not been clear. I suppose people with better wordsmithing skills than me will eventually end up with a more-or-less standardized expression to be included in the CONTRIBUTING file. From the point of view of contributors, the situation is a little clearer. In the current situation, using most generative AI tools to produce content essentially stops me from being able to sign a DCO or a CLA to contribute this content, since they both say "I certify that I wrote this" and I can't claim that any longer.

sazz 2y ago

I think this policy is yet another example of ethical overengineering. Yes, of course, ChatGPT & Co. are very unlikely to take any real care about what they give their models to learn - especially with regard to copyright. For a better perspective, I always try to transfer the behavior to the analog world. In this sense, someone who, for example, illegally obtains a book on Linux (let's say via ebook) would not be ethically in the correct position to contribute to Gentoo, because the knowledge on which their contribution is based would be stolen intellectual property. I can't imagine that there are any people in this world whose knowledge was obtained exclusively through copyright legal means. We are all in a gray area - one possibly more than the other. In my view, it is typical of engineers to simply transfer philosophically complicated moral issues to technologies. But this method will never come close to solving anything, because the very complicated analog moral world cannot simply be mapped to 0 or 1.