In summary,
Argument 1: LLM code is trained on stolen copyright, filled with errors, will mix up best practices, burns out our contributors, hurts the free software community, and threatens Debian's most important quality: its stability.
Argument 2: Some people find AI tools helpful.
"just one more dpkg bro I swear we are going to get pulseaudio and systemd working this time bro just one more data lane, you have to do this or you are going to fall behind bro trust me"
I'm all for Argument 1. Also, it's been scientifically proven that any sort of extended use to AU lowers your intelligence, and that would be the last thing we need for a distro that needs to remain a bastion of Stable.
Scientifically proven? Any sort of AI usage? Just genereal intelligence?
There are definitely some initial studies out already that point in that direction, but I think your wording is a bit overly broad and definitive. It will be a while until we understand all the factors involved and what is going on there exactly.
One of the most dangerous things about modern LLMs is that they rarely mess up in obvious ways.
They are incredibly good at making very subtle mistakes that look correct to non-experts.
That, combined with how drastically they lower the barrier of entry to creating functional software, creates the ultimate Dunning-Kruger scenario.
The amount of effort it takes to properly vet LLM-produced code is an order of magnitude more than the effort it takes to produce, which makes maintainers' work basically untenable. The "solution" proposed by AI shills is for the maintainers to do the same thing, but obviously that suffers from the exact same problem.
It's better to be broadly right than precisely wrong, and LLMs are fantastic at the latter.
I think we're in the middle of another wave similar to the "code bootcamp" era. The market is getting flooded with a bunch of people who want to make software engineer salaries without having to put in the effort to learn proper software engineering skills or computer science theory.
We're constantly hearing a more extreme version of the coding bootcamp propaganda, "Why go into debt $60k-$100k and spend four years of your life getting a Comp Sci degree, when you could spend just $15k-$25k and 6-12 months getting our cert to land the same jobs?" Now it's, "Why spend all the time and effort learning how to write & understand code, when you could just prompt an LLM to build all your software for you?"
But in the end, people will learn that there actually is value in having a deep, technical understanding of the theory and practices of software engineering. They'll learn that you can't just vibecode the next AWS, Linux kernel, SAP, hypervisor platform, or firewall appliance. They'll learn that it's not enough to just tell a swarm of agents to maintain your code base forever.
But it's going to be a very painful lesson for a lot of people, and when the AI bubble finally pops, it's going to be a truly Biblical reckoning for the entire tech industry.
I'm not bothered that much: the results are observable empirically with how idiocracy people in general have become in the last 2 years (not that we as a species were a beacon of understanding before that).
That said, in terms of "just general intelligence?" I'd say it's two intelligences that are hit the most: emotional intelligence and logical intelligence. Not necessarily in that order.
You forgot argument 3.
Argument 3: FUCK THIS SHIT! FUCK AI!
Hi, join us over on !FUCK_AI@lemmy.world
i swear to god fuck ai and llms can we just have one thing that's not enshittified by them
i really do think this is something that should be brought up more, whatever ones opinion on AI there at least needs to be some things that don't immediately jump on the bandwagon, as a fallback and control group.
like, fuck, imagine if our earliest ancestors had found some funny looking red mushrooms with white spots and all had a taste at once, our species would have gone extinct!
Those mushrooms are not deadly, they are hallucinogenic. People do in fact eat them for recreation, and berserkers used to take them in battle. Fly agaric is only deadly when its mycelium has been crossed with its sibling, the death cap, this creating a deadly hybrid. The psychedelic properties of fly agaric can be neutralized by boiling the mushrooms in salt water, do not try at home.
The choices kinda look like they would both either explicitly or in effect disallow practically all LLMs. Nice.
Though that doesn't answer the question about code analysis tools that the kernel devs recentently talked about (with Linus Torvalds being firmly in favor of using them). They aren't generative AI, but are AI nonetheless and unless Debian already talked about it elsewhere it does need explicit policy IMO.
Non-generative AI is just complicated stats.. There's no reason not to use ML or whatever if you can find a use for it (e.g. bug hunting, optimisation).
Generative AI is that plus random noise, copyright theft, environmental destruction, and fascism.. It should be off the cards for Debian
The choices kinda look like they would both either explicitly or in effect disallow practically all LLMs. Nice.
From what I see so far, there is a loophole. LLMs may not be used to generate source packages but if Claude generates a script that then does the work and the script stays private and isn't official Debian software, it's fine.
This may be an oversight or deliberate. No idea.
Wondering who gets a vote
These 1044 people: https://nm.debian.org/members/
Some of the people who work on Debian.
Feel free to put me in a cross and burn me alive for posting this, but I don't see a single problem with AI/LLM's being used in small things like bug testing a code and/or finding out ways to improve a code.
i mean.. okay then, step up and stretch your arms out while i get the hammer and nails..
I highly doubt that you don't know a single thing about AI, the climate crisis, the computer parts crisis, the datacenter/human health crisis and a lot of other things.
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