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KDE and AI, and you, and me
(pointieststick.com)
Personal opinion: Nathan seems to be really side-stepping a lot of concerns brought of up in the comments there. And referring to people coming together collectively in an open-letter when virtually all other channels are closed as 'brigading' is... Not cool. Edit: he retracted the use of brigading.
EDIT 2: Nate has since closed the comments on his blog, and the one discussion thread on KDE Discuss about the AI Policy was closed suddenly without explanation after a KDE developer began to discuss the ethics of AI use. Nate then responded after the thread was closed with this:
Earlier I already noticed OP glossing over nuance when commenting about this.
Reading the blog linked here I really don't see any issue, esp. not of the "drunk with power" kind which seems to be a go-to for certain people as soon as something icky comes up.
Being "leader" of an OSS project is not fun. It's like herding cats. And the money probably isn't so hot either.
Your skepticism rocks, but please attack actual rich assholes instead.
AFAICS so far, KDE likes to discuss things even more than other OSS projects, including public brainstorming.
I hope they come to a good policy against AI, which is problematic not only from a developer's POV.
So far KDE still seem to be in the brainstorming phase though.
To round off, some key parts (which I fear will get misquoted/overblown) from this very article:
It wasn't my intention to leave anything important out here.
edit:
But I was in a hurry when I wrote this.
I wanted to include/quote this post where Nate Graham states that simply forbidding AI-assisted contributions is no good because you cannot be 100% sure of any code not having been written with the help of AI.
Therefore such a roundabout rule makes no sense; instead one should ban the use of slop.
I am not a developer so I have to takes his word, but this makes a lot of sense to me.
The OP of that thread (who seems to be similarly inflamed as the OP of this one) then replied:
ngraham replied:
And once again I find myself agreeing.
That said, developers (and project leaders) should never forget the overall threat of AI, which goes well beyond software development. Like fucking our environment even more, and the people that live in it.
Whether KDE is willing to take such a political stance remains to be seen I guess? IDK what their track record is there.
I have since seen the proposal of a KDE AI policy - and no thanks to the "Nate Graham is bad" party in this thread. My takeaway:
OP is pitchforking hard on this topic all the time. Nuance is non-existent. They're causing a lot of damage to the community here, IMO.
Yes OP has been daily Doom posting for the last month or so. I daily drive plasma. And have been keeping an eye on things. But I have not seen anything unreasonable or concerning. I find Brody Robertson has a decent insight into some of these things and explains himself relatively well on these topics.
It's undeniable that AI has been trained unethically. And certain instances are being deployed unethically. Similar could be said for certain vaccines. We didn't ban use of them however. Unfortunately the cat is out of the bag when it comes to ethical training. AI is now a tool and it is widespread regardless of whether or not we like it. The best we can hope to do is to push for accountability going forward. Supporting everyone. And punishing those who act unethically.
People need to make the connection that the problem with AI replacing people. Isn't ai. It's that wealthy capitalists are trying to cut people off from a means of supporting themselves. I.E the problem is capitalism. The problem is always capitalism. The problem has always been capitalism and the system that came before. If we provided proper social safety nets and social support for everyone in society. No one would care if AI replaced them at some menial soul-sucking job. If they could live and pursue their passions instead they would all be glad to.
I've posted about the AI policy of KDE and two follow-ups as the situation developed over the past 4 days, and am unlikely to post anything further on KDE until a new development occurs, which I anticipate will be a while.
I have previously posted here once about Xfce using AI in their Wayland compositor, and about Debian adopting a permissive AI policy when the outcome of that vote occured.
If the cost was still the destruction of the environment and the genocide of foreign children, we'd have nowhere left to follow our passions in (worse if they are environment-related arts) nor people to teach or pass it down to.
AI is not just about the implementation. There's entire ethics behind it. As a technology, its entire purpose, its only purpose, is to replace humans, and it has to be understood in that capacity.
AI can be implemented ethically. AI can be done without destruction of the environment etc. Who cares if AI replaces people as long as we take care of the people.
Capitalism/authoritarianism is what destroys the environment and causes war and genocide. AI can never take away your passions or hinder your ability to pass them on.
If we outlaw generative AI tomorrow, nothing will change. Because the problem will remain untouched. It was never AI. But oligarchs leeching and exploiting society as always.
Potentially, yes. Currently this does not exist.
The AI policy proposed did not restrict AI usage to non-destructive self-hosted models.
The people who are most impacted by the negative externalities of AI are not taken care of. The people losing their jobs are also not taken care of. That is why people care so much. It's not viable to handwave away the negatives AI are causing in the here and now with the assurance that in some far off day we'll live in a post-capitalist world where the negatives won't matter.
False. There are a number of models trained on data they were explicitly given permission to train on. Are these the models they're using? Well I know as much as you, which is to say I don't know. Though I think we'd probably agree they aren't largely. But aren't != can't.
Brody's videos that I linked go into this rationally and reasonably.
There's no reasonable way they can actually ban this. And they don't have the time or money to police it. The only real solution is to just shut the projects down at this point. Is that what you're aiming for?
No one is hand waving away the negative impacts. You are simply misattributing them to artificial intelligence and not wealthy authoritarians seeking to profit. By all means, fuck zuck, musk, altman, etc and their companies. They've always been and always will be destructive in every way possible. AI or not.
Not that I'm agreeing with OP and their ilk, but imo "ethical" must include broader environmental and societal and geopolitical impact.
You do not address this.
But afaik LLMs that are ethical in this respect as well, also exist. Although maybe they aren't "Large".
So far from what I've seen when I investigated self-labeled ethical models, I found that they weren't actually trained ethically, and not on code that is compatible with GPL or code that doesn't need to be attributed. (if you can find one that has proven otherwise, I'd be open to taking a look at it).
That said, I don't think there would have been as much push back if the KDE proposal had explicitly limited AI use to self-hosted models.
According to the KDE devs, the proposal was intended to allow them to easily reject clearly slop PRs. A policy that limits AI use to self-hosted models would have achieved that goal just as well as one that allows any model, and would essentially be an honor system, which I suspect most contributors would be willing to follow (obviously not all, and there is nothing stopping a contributor from lying that their corporate AI code was generated on a local LLM, but then again, there are also rules asking contributors to not knowingly submit copyrighted code from proprietary software, which is also an honor system).
To be honest, I'm struggling to understand why you would be against a policy that at least attempts to limit the benefit/gain to those wealthy authoritarians. A policy that did so would not require any further resources from the dev team compared to the one they attempted to implement, it would basically just be an official request to contributors to not use the explicitly fascist owned tools that are most contributing to global warming and our subjugation.
The way Nate is framing the original intent of the proposal, that KDE was swamped with AI slop and they just needed a quick policy that would allow them to comfortably reject it, doesn't seem quite accurate. If that was all they needed, it seems like it would've been quite easily to propose an ad-hoc policy of allowing maintainers to reject suspected AI slop PRs at will, which would solve the immediate problem while allowing them to gather more feedback on a 'proper' policy. Adding a provision to not require any AI disclosure doesn't help with the stated goal of just wanting a way to easily reject slop.
I've read the positions of some of the developers involved in the proposal thread on other platforms, and most have made it very clear that they are pro-AI (I do not include Nate among them, as he has stated he actually dislikes AI and doesn't use it). Among that group, the concerns about AI ethics and their use are, ultimately, of secondary concern over the prospect of increased productivity and time savings. That inclination is what resulted in so little credence given to the people raising concerns against it in the proposal thread (it was clear that the concept of not accepting AI code, or even just limiting it to self-hosted models, was not on the table from the outset).
Nate is clearly distressed from the negative reaction the proposal has caused, and I can sympathize with that. However, from what I've read of his responses on his linked blog, IMHO it is mostly damage control, and still isn't addressing the main concerns people had about the original policy proposal. When people point out the copyright, environmental, and ethical issues, Nate will acknowledge those, but insists that the original proposal, by virtue of it allowing them to quickly reject obvious AI code, would've been an improvement (despite it also giving the provision that AI use didn't have to be disclosed, essentially meaning that those skillful enough to make it not obvious will still be perpetuating the ethical, environmental, and copyright issues, but just in the dark without anyone knowing the severity).
In the linked blog post, many of the comments are saying that KDE effectively closed down most avenues to provide feedback on the proposal, thus leaving them with essentially the only option of making the KDE For People open letter, as otherwise it appeared that any public dissent against a permissive AI policy was ultimately going to be dismissed as the Pro-AI group decided on a policy behind closed doors.
Their justification for planning to make it a closed door decision was two people in the proposal thread, both of which easily could've been removed from the thread, or the thread closed to developers only, and their discussion could've continued without any difficulty. I personally don't believe their justification, as it clearly seems like it was closed and ultimately made hidden to avoid the public relations fallout the main discussion was having for being so dismissal of the AI concerns brought up.
I invite anyone curious to read the blog and the comments below, and come to their own conclusion. (Be sure to click 'old comments' on that blog, as most are now hidden behind that).
KDE right now has a very reasonable position, but of course being utilitarian and reasonable wouldn't be ever enough for purists that will be throwing shit on the project regardless of what policy will be accepted in the end (OP is already doing it, some other people on fedi as well).
By your account I guess Cheaters in college should have used the defense of professors that caught them as "purists" ... Get the FO of here with that.
You misunderstood your relationship with kde, they aren't your student, nor they are accountable or obligated to you in any way. This purity testing thing is dumb and achieves nothing but drama.
Are you under the impression that making a nearly identical comment over and over will make you more convincing? I assure you it is the opposite.