37 ms·

Gentoo AI Policy

191 points by simonpure 1y ago

perching_aix 1y ago
Dated 2024-04-14 and features nothing special.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Interestingly --- while I doubt it would make a difference to the decision Gentoo in particular would make --- the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this, when the first iteration of foundation models tuned for effective agents came out. People forget that effective coding agents are just a couple minutes old; the first research preview release of Claude Code was this past February.
  - blibble 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - jatora 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - tptacek 1y ago
        We're not supposed to write comments like this.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - malfist 1y ago
    > the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this People say this every month.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      Do they? I'm referring to something specific. While I happen to think LLM coding agents are pretty great, my point didn't depend on you thinking that, only on a recognition of the fact that the capabilities of these systems sharply changed very shortly after they published this --- in a very specific, noticeable way.
    - sothatsit 1y ago
      Marketing people say this every month, but that doesn't mean there haven't also been actual step-changes in AI-assisted coding in the last year. The policy is dated to 2024-04-14. After they approved this, there were all of these releases that were all pretty dramatic advancements for coding: 3.5 Sonnet (for taste + agentic coding), o1-preview (for reasoning), Claude Code (for developer experience), o3 (for debugging), Claude 4 Opus (for reliability), and now GPT-5 Pro (for code review). We have advanced from AI that can unreliably help you look up documentation for tools like matplotlib, to AI tools that can write and review large complex programs in the last year alone. Sure, these tools still have a lot of deficiencies. But that doesn't negate the fact that the change in AI for coding in the last year has been dramatic.
- notherhack 1y ago
  Important point. A lot has changed in coding AIs since then.
ares623 1y ago
Maybe we’ll see a (new) distro with AI assisted maintainers. That would be an interesting experiment. Unfortunately one caveat would be it will be difficult to separate the maintainers from the financial incentives, so it won’t be a fair comparison. (e.g. the labs funding full time maintainers with salaries and donations that other distros can only dream of)
logicprog 1y ago
There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't: > Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? > Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. This is massively overblown. If they'd specifically said that their concerns were around the concentrated impact of energy and water usage on specific communities, fine, but then you'd have to have ethical concerns about a lot of other tech including video streaming; but the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech products. > The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. Is this talking about automation? You know what else automated employees and can often reduce service quality? Software. > LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts. So did email.
- bleepblap 1y ago
  >> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. > I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? Absolutely not! Every major FOSS license has copyright as its enforcement method -- "if you don't do X (share code with customers, etc depending on license) you lose the right to copy the code"
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  >> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. > I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? No free and open source software (FOSS) distribution model is "anti-copyright." Quite to the contrary, FOSS licenses are well defined[0] and either address copyright directly or rely on copyright being retained by the original author. 0 - https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Some of the ideas behind the GPL could be anti-copyright, insofar as the concept they’d love to see is software being uncopyrightable.
AdieuToLogic 1y ago
Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to review contributions and detect the mistakes resulting from the use of AI. The first non-title sentence is the most notable to consider, with the rest providing reasoning difficult to refute.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - AdieuToLogic 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - sgarland 1y ago
        But definitions can and are proven false. I hate it, mind you, but I can’t ignore it. For example, the usage of “literally” as an intensifier, e.g. “I literally died of laughter.”
        Eisenstein 1y ago
        But that is their whole point -- as much as you want to make the definition something else, you can't. And this is a perfect example of that.
        perching_aix 1y ago
        Logical statements can be proven true/false. Definitions are not logical statements, they do not have truth values, therefore cannot be proven neither true, nor false. These are mathematical logic basics.
hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. I’d be curious how much energy gentoo consumes versus a binary distro.
- mervn 1y ago
  [dead]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
hjdjeiejd 1y ago
This is on-brand. There was a time that I used Gentoo, and may again one day, but for the past N years, I’ve not had time to compile everything from source, and compiling from source is a false sense of security, since you still don’t know what’s been compromised (it could be the compiler, etc.), and few have the time or expertise to adequately review all of the code. It can be a waste of energy and time to compile everything from source for standard hardware. But, when I’m retired, maybe I’ll use it again just for the heck of it. And I’m glad that Gentoo exists.
- atrettel 1y ago
  At least when I used Gentoo, the point of compiling from source was more about customization than security. I remember having to set so many different options. It was quite granular. Now I just compile certain things from scratch and modify them as needed rather than having an entire system like Gentoo do that, but I do see the appeal to some people.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    This is exactly why I use it where I use it - on my servers. I don’t need to compile X or X support for programs that could have it, because they’re headless.
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    Nix is another route as far as a compile-from-source package manager with lots of options on many packages.
    - Cyph0n 1y ago
      I feel like most Gentoo folks probably moved over to Nix/NixOS. The security argument for recompiling from source is addressed by the input addressed (sic) package cache. The customization aspect is mostly covered by Nix package overrides and overlays. You can also setup your own package cache.
      - 1y ago
danpalmer 1y ago
This is a prime example of poor AI policy. It doesn't define what AI is – is using Google translate in order to engage on their mailing lists allowed? Is using Intellisense-like tools that we've had for decades allowed? The rationale is also poor, citing concerns that can be applied far more widely than just LLMs. The ethical concerns are pretty hand-wavy, I'm pretty sure email is used to empower spam and yet I suspect Gentoo have no problem using email. The end result is not necessarily a bad one, and I think reasonable for a project like Gentoo to go for, but the policy could be stated in a much better way. For example: thou shalt only contribute code that is unencumbered by copyright issues, contributions must be of a high quality and repeated attempts to submit poor quality contributions may result in new contributions not being reviewed/accepted. As for the ethical concerns, they could just take a position by buying infrastructure from companies that align with their ethics, or not accepting corporate donations (time or money) from companies that they disagree with.
- Spivak 1y ago
  Or because this is a policy by and for human adults who all understand what we're talking about you just don't accept contributions from anyone obviously rule-lawyering in bad faith. This isn't a court system, anyone intentionally trying to test the boundaries probably isn't someone you want to bother with in the first place.
  - danpalmer 1y ago
    This policy being so specific in what it bans means that you can't enforce it easily against people who are close but technically within the letter of the policy, and you create a grey area and friction for those who are meeting the spirit of the policy in good faith, but technically in violation. I have friends and colleagues who I trust as good engineers who take different positions on this (letter vs spirit) and I think there are good faith contributions negatively impacted by both sides of this.
- dmead 1y ago
  > It doesn't define what AI is this is a bad faith comment.
simianwords 1y ago
> Ethical concerns. The business side of AI boom is creating serious ethical concerns. Among them: Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts. Highly disingenuous. First, AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is. Though I have to agree that this is the relatively strongest ethical claim to stop using AI but stands weak if looked at on the whole. The fact that they mentioned "energy and water use" should tell you that they are really looking for reasons to disparage AI. AI doesn't use any more water or energy than any other tool. An hour of Netflix uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions. A single 10 hour flight (per person*) emits as much as around 100k GPT prompts. It is strange that one would repeat the same nonsense about AI without primary motive being ideological. "The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality." this is just a shoddy opinion at this point. To be clear - I understand why they might ban AI for code submissions. It reduces the barrier significantly and increases the noise. But the reasoning is motivated from a wrong place.
- ses1984 1y ago
  The idea that models are transformative is debatable. Works with copyright are the thing that imbues the model with value. If that statement isn’t true, then they can just exclude those works and nothing is lost, right? Also, half the problem isn’t distribution, it’s how those works were acquired. Even if you suppose models 44are transformative, you can’t just download stuff from piratebay. Buy copies, scan them, rip them, etc. It’s super not cool that billion dollar vc companies can just do that.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    > In Monday's order, Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup supported Anthropic's argument, stating the company's use of books by the plaintiffs to train their AI model was acceptable. "The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative." I agree it is debatable but it is not so cut and clear that it is _not_ transformative when a judge has ruled that it is.
mmaunder 1y ago
Posted April 2024. I wonder how they feel about this now. Or will next year. Claude Code wouldn’t exist for another year when this was posted. Nevermind Codex. It’s already awkward. Within 12 months it will be cringeworthy.
dizlexic 1y ago
This might get me in trouble, but with all the negativity I’m seeing here I’ve got to ask. Why do you care? Their sandbox their rules, and if you care because you want to contribute you’re still free to do so. Unless you’re an LLM I guess, but the rest of us should have no problem. The negativity just seems overblown. More power to them, and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it.
- attentive 1y ago
  > and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it. how would they know? - this is (one of) the ways for people to let them know
  - joecool1029 1y ago
    It isn't though. This is just noise. It's a good conversation thread for HN, but it has absolutely zero influence on Gentoo policy. The only way it'll be revisited is if active Gentoo developers and/or contributors really start to push with a justification to get it changed and they agree to revisit discussing it again. I can tell you every maintainer has heard the line: 'I would have contributed if you did X thing'.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Let's stop bullshitting, nobody here is going to contribute to Gentoo and is now put off because of this policy change. What we're looking at is mostly JavaScript monkeys who feel personally offended because they're unable to differentiate criticism of their tools from criticism of their own personal character. The outrage is purely theoretical.
    - dizlexic 1y ago
      As a JavaScript monkey I believe you have a point, and this was the core of my original question. How many contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Probably none. How many potential contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Maybe dozens? I'll be amazed if this has any notable negative outcomes for Gentoo and their contributions.
ericdotlee 1y ago
Humans are important - but I have to wonder how any of this will be enforced?
puilp0502 1y ago
Every time I encounter these kinds of policy, I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced: The people who are considerate enough to abide by these policies, are the ones who would have "cared" about the code qualities and stuff like that, so the policy is a moot point for these kinds of people. OTOH, the people who recklessly spam "contributions" generated from LLMs, by their very nature, would not respect these policies in very high likelihood. For me it's like telling bullies to don't bully. By the way, I'm in no way against these kinds of policy: I've seen what happened to curl, and I think it's fully in their rights to outright ban any usage of LLMs. I'm just concerned about the enforceability of these policies.
- h4ny 1y ago
  You just stop accepting contributions from them? There is nothing inherently different about these policies that make them more or less difficult to enforce than other kinds of polices.
- joecool1029 1y ago
  > I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced One of the parties that decided on Gentoo's policy effectively said the same thing. If I get what you're really asking... the reality is, there's no way for them to know if a LLM tool was used internally, it's honor system. But I mean enforcement is just ban the contributor if they become a problem. They've banned or otherwise restricted other ones for being disruptive or spamming low quality contributions in the past. It's worded the way it is because most of the parties understand this isn't going away and might get revisited eventually. At least one of them hardline opposes LLM contributions in any form and probably won't change their mind.
  - puilp0502 1y ago
    I see. So if I'm understanding correctly, then this policy serves as a kind of "legal ground" from which the maintainers can take action against perpetrators, right? To add a bit more context, when I was writing the original comment, I was mainly thinking of first-time contributors that don't have any track records, and how the policy would work against them.
DrNosferatu 1y ago
[flagged]
DrNosferatu 1y ago
I would say the question is, do you iterate on the output or not? My perspective is that this criticism is only valid for “single-shot in spirit” / “prompt and forget” LLM powered contributions.
- sumeno 1y ago
  That ignores two out of the three reasons they gave for this decision
drnick1 1y ago
I don't understand this anti-AI stance. Either the code works and is useful, and it should be accepted, or it doesn't work and it should be rejected. Does it really matter who wrote it?
- globular-toast 1y ago
  Putting together and maintaining a GNU/Linux distribution and maintaining it for 23 years requires a bit more than "works for me and is useful".
- sensanaty 1y ago
  LLMs give idiots the power to effectively DDoS repos with useless slop PRs that they have to expend the time and effort to triage and ignore. Like the curl maintainers have said, the review burden of looking at mountains of AI-generated crap is horrifically time consuming.
- cuu508 1y ago
  The linked API policy lists specific concerns in 3 categories: copyright, quality, ethical. Which one do you not understand?
  - drnick1 1y ago
    I don't care about "ethics" in the abstract if the code works and is of good "quality" (however you choose to define that). AIs don't have copyright over anything they generate, so that's a non issue. In fact, if the code is any good, it should be impossible to tell if it was written by AI at all.
    - cuu508 1y ago
      > I don't care about "ethics" in the abstract if the code works and is of good "quality" But there are people who do care. > AIs don't have copyright over anything they generate, so that's a non issue. The problem is AIs also don't have copyright for the material they are trained on. > In fact, if the code is any good, it should be impossible to tell if it was written by AI at all. Do you mean, if somebody can successfully hide the fact they used AI, all concerns go away because nobody will be able to tell anyway?
PeterStuer 1y ago
To be fair, any of their 3 objections are absolutely not exclusive to AI, but can be levied against any human contribution as well. Any contributer, wether openly using AI or covertly, should be reputed by earned merit of the contribution history. Yes, I know there are still holdouts that realy do not use AI, but that number is shrinking rapidly. A no AI policy when strictly enforced (how?) would probably just lead to project EoL.
mrheosuper 1y ago
I wonder how would they enforce it. If they let a pure LLM Commit into their codebase, then there are a lot of another commit that depends on it, would they remove it and try to submit another commit to replace it, or just let it be ?
nextaccountic 1y ago
Does this apply to upstream packages distributed by Gentoo too? Or just things that the Gentoo project is itself upstream, like emerge?
bgwalter 1y ago
It is interesting that so many people are upset about this policy. If "AI" actually worked, you could plagiarize the whole of Gentoo in one hour. But no, you always have to infiltrate and harass existing projects, because without the actual human developers your poor "AI" "contributions" are nothing.

Gentoo AI Policy

191 points by simonpure 1y ago

perching_aix 1y ago

Dated 2024-04-14 and features nothing special.

tptacek 1y ago
Interestingly --- while I doubt it would make a difference to the decision Gentoo in particular would make --- the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this, when the first iteration of foundation models tuned for effective agents came out. People forget that effective coding agents are just a couple minutes old; the first research preview release of Claude Code was this past February.
- blibble 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jatora 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - tptacek 1y ago
      We're not supposed to write comments like this.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- malfist 1y ago
  > the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this People say this every month.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    Do they? I'm referring to something specific. While I happen to think LLM coding agents are pretty great, my point didn't depend on you thinking that, only on a recognition of the fact that the capabilities of these systems sharply changed very shortly after they published this --- in a very specific, noticeable way.
  - sothatsit 1y ago
    Marketing people say this every month, but that doesn't mean there haven't also been actual step-changes in AI-assisted coding in the last year. The policy is dated to 2024-04-14. After they approved this, there were all of these releases that were all pretty dramatic advancements for coding: 3.5 Sonnet (for taste + agentic coding), o1-preview (for reasoning), Claude Code (for developer experience), o3 (for debugging), Claude 4 Opus (for reliability), and now GPT-5 Pro (for code review). We have advanced from AI that can unreliably help you look up documentation for tools like matplotlib, to AI tools that can write and review large complex programs in the last year alone. Sure, these tools still have a lot of deficiencies. But that doesn't negate the fact that the change in AI for coding in the last year has been dramatic.
notherhack 1y ago
Important point. A lot has changed in coding AIs since then.

ares623 1y ago

Maybe we’ll see a (new) distro with AI assisted maintainers. That would be an interesting experiment. Unfortunately one caveat would be it will be difficult to separate the maintainers from the financial incentives, so it won’t be a fair comparison. (e.g. the labs funding full time maintainers with salaries and donations that other distros can only dream of)

logicprog 1y ago

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't: > Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? > Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. This is massively overblown. If they'd specifically said that their concerns were around the concentrated impact of energy and water usage on specific communities, fine, but then you'd have to have ethical concerns about a lot of other tech including video streaming; but the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech products. > The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. Is this talking about automation? You know what else automated employees and can often reduce service quality? Software. > LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts. So did email.

bleepblap 1y ago
>> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. > I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? Absolutely not! Every major FOSS license has copyright as its enforcement method -- "if you don't do X (share code with customers, etc depending on license) you lose the right to copy the code"
AdieuToLogic 1y ago
>> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. > I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? No free and open source software (FOSS) distribution model is "anti-copyright." Quite to the contrary, FOSS licenses are well defined[0] and either address copyright directly or rely on copyright being retained by the original author. 0 - https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses
- bombcar 1y ago
  Some of the ideas behind the GPL could be anti-copyright, insofar as the concept they’d love to see is software being uncopyrightable.

AdieuToLogic 1y ago

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to review contributions and detect the mistakes resulting from the use of AI. The first non-title sentence is the most notable to consider, with the rest providing reasoning difficult to refute.

perching_aix 1y ago
[flagged]
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - sgarland 1y ago
      But definitions can and are proven false. I hate it, mind you, but I can’t ignore it. For example, the usage of “literally” as an intensifier, e.g. “I literally died of laughter.”
      - Eisenstein 1y ago
        But that is their whole point -- as much as you want to make the definition something else, you can't. And this is a perfect example of that.
      - perching_aix 1y ago
        Logical statements can be proven true/false. Definitions are not logical statements, they do not have truth values, therefore cannot be proven neither true, nor false. These are mathematical logic basics.

hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago

> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. I’d be curious how much energy gentoo consumes versus a binary distro.

mervn 1y ago
[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

hjdjeiejd 1y ago

This is on-brand. There was a time that I used Gentoo, and may again one day, but for the past N years, I’ve not had time to compile everything from source, and compiling from source is a false sense of security, since you still don’t know what’s been compromised (it could be the compiler, etc.), and few have the time or expertise to adequately review all of the code. It can be a waste of energy and time to compile everything from source for standard hardware. But, when I’m retired, maybe I’ll use it again just for the heck of it. And I’m glad that Gentoo exists.

atrettel 1y ago
At least when I used Gentoo, the point of compiling from source was more about customization than security. I remember having to set so many different options. It was quite granular. Now I just compile certain things from scratch and modify them as needed rather than having an entire system like Gentoo do that, but I do see the appeal to some people.
- bombcar 1y ago
  This is exactly why I use it where I use it - on my servers. I don’t need to compile X or X support for programs that could have it, because they’re headless.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  Nix is another route as far as a compile-from-source package manager with lots of options on many packages.
  - Cyph0n 1y ago
    I feel like most Gentoo folks probably moved over to Nix/NixOS. The security argument for recompiling from source is addressed by the input addressed (sic) package cache. The customization aspect is mostly covered by Nix package overrides and overlays. You can also setup your own package cache.
    - 1y ago

danpalmer 1y ago

This is a prime example of poor AI policy. It doesn't define what AI is – is using Google translate in order to engage on their mailing lists allowed? Is using Intellisense-like tools that we've had for decades allowed? The rationale is also poor, citing concerns that can be applied far more widely than just LLMs. The ethical concerns are pretty hand-wavy, I'm pretty sure email is used to empower spam and yet I suspect Gentoo have no problem using email. The end result is not necessarily a bad one, and I think reasonable for a project like Gentoo to go for, but the policy could be stated in a much better way. For example: thou shalt only contribute code that is unencumbered by copyright issues, contributions must be of a high quality and repeated attempts to submit poor quality contributions may result in new contributions not being reviewed/accepted. As for the ethical concerns, they could just take a position by buying infrastructure from companies that align with their ethics, or not accepting corporate donations (time or money) from companies that they disagree with.

Spivak 1y ago
Or because this is a policy by and for human adults who all understand what we're talking about you just don't accept contributions from anyone obviously rule-lawyering in bad faith. This isn't a court system, anyone intentionally trying to test the boundaries probably isn't someone you want to bother with in the first place.
- danpalmer 1y ago
  This policy being so specific in what it bans means that you can't enforce it easily against people who are close but technically within the letter of the policy, and you create a grey area and friction for those who are meeting the spirit of the policy in good faith, but technically in violation. I have friends and colleagues who I trust as good engineers who take different positions on this (letter vs spirit) and I think there are good faith contributions negatively impacted by both sides of this.
dmead 1y ago
> It doesn't define what AI is this is a bad faith comment.

simianwords 1y ago

> Ethical concerns. The business side of AI boom is creating serious ethical concerns. Among them: Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts. Highly disingenuous. First, AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is. Though I have to agree that this is the relatively strongest ethical claim to stop using AI but stands weak if looked at on the whole. The fact that they mentioned "energy and water use" should tell you that they are really looking for reasons to disparage AI. AI doesn't use any more water or energy than any other tool. An hour of Netflix uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions. A single 10 hour flight (per person*) emits as much as around 100k GPT prompts. It is strange that one would repeat the same nonsense about AI without primary motive being ideological. "The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality." this is just a shoddy opinion at this point. To be clear - I understand why they might ban AI for code submissions. It reduces the barrier significantly and increases the noise. But the reasoning is motivated from a wrong place.

ses1984 1y ago
The idea that models are transformative is debatable. Works with copyright are the thing that imbues the model with value. If that statement isn’t true, then they can just exclude those works and nothing is lost, right? Also, half the problem isn’t distribution, it’s how those works were acquired. Even if you suppose models 44are transformative, you can’t just download stuff from piratebay. Buy copies, scan them, rip them, etc. It’s super not cool that billion dollar vc companies can just do that.
- simianwords 1y ago
  > In Monday's order, Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup supported Anthropic's argument, stating the company's use of books by the plaintiffs to train their AI model was acceptable. "The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative." I agree it is debatable but it is not so cut and clear that it is _not_ transformative when a judge has ruled that it is.

mmaunder 1y ago

Posted April 2024. I wonder how they feel about this now. Or will next year. Claude Code wouldn’t exist for another year when this was posted. Nevermind Codex. It’s already awkward. Within 12 months it will be cringeworthy.

dizlexic 1y ago

This might get me in trouble, but with all the negativity I’m seeing here I’ve got to ask. Why do you care? Their sandbox their rules, and if you care because you want to contribute you’re still free to do so. Unless you’re an LLM I guess, but the rest of us should have no problem. The negativity just seems overblown. More power to them, and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it.

attentive 1y ago
> and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it. how would they know? - this is (one of) the ways for people to let them know
- joecool1029 1y ago
  It isn't though. This is just noise. It's a good conversation thread for HN, but it has absolutely zero influence on Gentoo policy. The only way it'll be revisited is if active Gentoo developers and/or contributors really start to push with a justification to get it changed and they agree to revisit discussing it again. I can tell you every maintainer has heard the line: 'I would have contributed if you did X thing'.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Let's stop bullshitting, nobody here is going to contribute to Gentoo and is now put off because of this policy change. What we're looking at is mostly JavaScript monkeys who feel personally offended because they're unable to differentiate criticism of their tools from criticism of their own personal character. The outrage is purely theoretical.
  - dizlexic 1y ago
    As a JavaScript monkey I believe you have a point, and this was the core of my original question. How many contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Probably none. How many potential contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Maybe dozens? I'll be amazed if this has any notable negative outcomes for Gentoo and their contributions.

ericdotlee 1y ago

Humans are important - but I have to wonder how any of this will be enforced?

puilp0502 1y ago

Every time I encounter these kinds of policy, I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced: The people who are considerate enough to abide by these policies, are the ones who would have "cared" about the code qualities and stuff like that, so the policy is a moot point for these kinds of people. OTOH, the people who recklessly spam "contributions" generated from LLMs, by their very nature, would not respect these policies in very high likelihood. For me it's like telling bullies to don't bully. By the way, I'm in no way against these kinds of policy: I've seen what happened to curl, and I think it's fully in their rights to outright ban any usage of LLMs. I'm just concerned about the enforceability of these policies.

h4ny 1y ago
You just stop accepting contributions from them? There is nothing inherently different about these policies that make them more or less difficult to enforce than other kinds of polices.
joecool1029 1y ago
> I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced One of the parties that decided on Gentoo's policy effectively said the same thing. If I get what you're really asking... the reality is, there's no way for them to know if a LLM tool was used internally, it's honor system. But I mean enforcement is just ban the contributor if they become a problem. They've banned or otherwise restricted other ones for being disruptive or spamming low quality contributions in the past. It's worded the way it is because most of the parties understand this isn't going away and might get revisited eventually. At least one of them hardline opposes LLM contributions in any form and probably won't change their mind.
- puilp0502 1y ago
  I see. So if I'm understanding correctly, then this policy serves as a kind of "legal ground" from which the maintainers can take action against perpetrators, right? To add a bit more context, when I was writing the original comment, I was mainly thinking of first-time contributors that don't have any track records, and how the policy would work against them.

DrNosferatu 1y ago

[flagged]

DrNosferatu 1y ago

I would say the question is, do you iterate on the output or not? My perspective is that this criticism is only valid for “single-shot in spirit” / “prompt and forget” LLM powered contributions.

sumeno 1y ago
That ignores two out of the three reasons they gave for this decision

drnick1 1y ago

I don't understand this anti-AI stance. Either the code works and is useful, and it should be accepted, or it doesn't work and it should be rejected. Does it really matter who wrote it?

globular-toast 1y ago
Putting together and maintaining a GNU/Linux distribution and maintaining it for 23 years requires a bit more than "works for me and is useful".
sensanaty 1y ago
LLMs give idiots the power to effectively DDoS repos with useless slop PRs that they have to expend the time and effort to triage and ignore. Like the curl maintainers have said, the review burden of looking at mountains of AI-generated crap is horrifically time consuming.
cuu508 1y ago
The linked API policy lists specific concerns in 3 categories: copyright, quality, ethical. Which one do you not understand?
- drnick1 1y ago
  I don't care about "ethics" in the abstract if the code works and is of good "quality" (however you choose to define that). AIs don't have copyright over anything they generate, so that's a non issue. In fact, if the code is any good, it should be impossible to tell if it was written by AI at all.
  - cuu508 1y ago
    > I don't care about "ethics" in the abstract if the code works and is of good "quality" But there are people who do care. > AIs don't have copyright over anything they generate, so that's a non issue. The problem is AIs also don't have copyright for the material they are trained on. > In fact, if the code is any good, it should be impossible to tell if it was written by AI at all. Do you mean, if somebody can successfully hide the fact they used AI, all concerns go away because nobody will be able to tell anyway?

PeterStuer 1y ago

To be fair, any of their 3 objections are absolutely not exclusive to AI, but can be levied against any human contribution as well. Any contributer, wether openly using AI or covertly, should be reputed by earned merit of the contribution history. Yes, I know there are still holdouts that realy do not use AI, but that number is shrinking rapidly. A no AI policy when strictly enforced (how?) would probably just lead to project EoL.

mrheosuper 1y ago

I wonder how would they enforce it. If they let a pure LLM Commit into their codebase, then there are a lot of another commit that depends on it, would they remove it and try to submit another commit to replace it, or just let it be ?

nextaccountic 1y ago

Does this apply to upstream packages distributed by Gentoo too? Or just things that the Gentoo project is itself upstream, like emerge?

bgwalter 1y ago

It is interesting that so many people are upset about this policy. If "AI" actually worked, you could plagiarize the whole of Gentoo in one hour. But no, you always have to infiltrate and harass existing projects, because without the actual human developers your poor "AI" "contributions" are nothing.