275

GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.

We do not understand where you're coming from or why you're so incredibly angry with us. It's not justified and does not make sense.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top new old
[-] droopy4096@lemmy.ca 23 points 3 days ago

OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all. Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn't ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code. LLMs are SO on steroids (actually trained on SO topics). So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it's results blindly is silly and dangerous.

There's a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source. Also: if OSS community did not use AI it would hardly stop it from continuing it's growth in Enterprise. So there's not much of a winning strategy there either.

Which brings us to GrapheneOS decision and given above reasons I think it's a well-balanced decision.

[-] Kynn@jlai.lu 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You can achieve wealth and happiness way faster if you rob all other countries of their resources. But if it is feasible, must it still be done ?

Kind of the same thing with LLM. It’s not because you can that you should.

As you said, LLM is killing OS communities. It’s preventing people from working together, now they are all "I don’t need you, I can do it my way all alone", and you get 50 clones or similar softwares, which aren’t finely tuned since it’s all LLM.

As you didn’t say, LLM has a huge impact on the planet, it costs a lot of electricity, it uses clean water which it evaporates in data center, but we don’t care because guess what, we have it in our hands and it’s so much fun to use ! And well, we ourselves are not responsible for the planet’s state, it’s the big bad company that create LLM, I'm just using it because otherwise, the other will do so !

What’s next ? After coding our own little games and softwares alone and ultra-quickly I mean.

Who pays the bills ? Who will pay the next one, and where is humanity going ? Not sure I want to know.

AI Searchers are quitting their jobs being scared of what they enabled Companies are being hacked by LLM without control People are losing their jobs because of LLM (and I think those are not the ones using LLM in the OS Community, because oh, the irony it would be)

Society clearly isn’t ready for any of this, and saying "don’t care" doesn’t make it fine.

Edit : this is cleary not on or against you, I'm simply expressing my frustration on this subject with arguments and examples I hope should make people realize things x)

[-] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all.

This tool is however not neutral but has a lot of steering and bias built in. Like an advisor who optimizes heavily for personal gain. For example, it constantly tells you that it knows it all and also that your ideas are the best thing since sliced bread. A lot of stuff around them is engineered to increase engagement and make you dependent on them. Precisely like social media which is full of "brain hacks" - no, this isn't hyperbole, this is the name that engineers at Facebook gave to their creations. As social media, commercial LLMs are "addictive by design".

Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn't ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code.

Stack Overflow is a really good example. I am programming over 40 years, since 35 years as hired programmer, since 25 years on PhD level and I used Stack Overflow a lot to find interesting new angles on issues with seemingly obvious answers. Like "what is the most portable, clearest way to efficiently serialize message data in a C struct, given that type punning is only defined for some compilers and can lead to undefined behaviour".

Stack overflow has typically various opinionated commented answers here, which gives you different angles and you can decide what is best in your case. This is crucial since a lot - one could say, almost all - of software engineering is about trade-offs.

ChatGPT is the know-all of stack overflow responders: It gives you a single smart-allecky answer and is purposefully built so it tries to take decisions out of your hands. It currently also makes a ton of suggestions of which some have a point, some might apply in other cases but not yours, and some are bullshit. If you let it run free you will easily get ten times more code than needed. And ten times more code means ten times more bugs - this is well-established.

So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it's results blindly is silly and dangerous.

The thing is that commercial LLMs in practice are engineered to short-circuit your judgment and decision-making.

There's a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source.

First: These companies will siphon off open source code anyway, be it legal or not. That is outside of the influence of single open source developers or projects. Maybe a matter of high courts and civil society lawsuits to decide. And these will have to fight an uphill battle against the current political climate around favouring large companies in general and that kind of exploitative AI in particular.

But what projects do have influence over is the quality of their code base and what ingresses into it.

Further, it is to expected that the quality of commercial code bases continues to degrade at a rapid pace and also that companies will depend even more on open source infrastructure and libraries - and FOSS developers training the LLMs they use on anything that is new. Because the average commercial project or github project just will turn to shit. Companies will soon wistfully remember old times where Sturgeon's law was a thing and when only 90% of all public code was shit, and not 99.999% . (Congratulations to that future five nines!).

There is an asymmetry between open source code and proprietary software: Open source code is protected by copyright law. Which GenAI vendor companies practically do ignore. Proprietary software is usually protected by copyright law, and also obfuscation by it being binary or behind server APIs. Currently, this works in favour of companies: They get to use GPL-proteced public code, but are not exposing their own, uh, creations. (And of course, LLM vendors will make the solemn pinky promise that they never ever will publish commercial code their customers are working on as LLM output (ask top-notch mathematicians how that worked out).)

But will this stay like this? Because another issue is that the same methods can be used to decompile binary code, and LLMs can also be trained on decompiled proprietary code. Which will, for example, make its many hidden security issues much more acute.

[-] spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago

Agree 100% I was about to mention training the LLM on decompiled binaries, but you mentioned that too. I guarantee the Chinese models are already doing it.

[-] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Another thing is I think one can analyze binaries (decompiled or not) to extract control structures in machine code or byte code to control flow graphs. Using some classical pattern matching, that should not be too difficult because the number of ways compilers transform code like loops are limited. Allowing some degree of fuzziness, I'd often expect these to be very characteristic for the original source of a code piece. That source might often be FOSS code; often an old, vendored version not updated in years.

One could then use standard graph search/fuzzy matching algorithms and graph databases in order to find out which GPL’d open-source code e.g. some proprietary product has included. This would give away potentially vulnerable versions. And it would not necessarily need a lot of computing resources.

[-] spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

I'm just waiting for Microsoft and Windows to get blown wide open by this Pandora's box they've opened.

load more comments (8 replies)
[-] Mac@mander.xyz 57 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I'm anti-WhateverTheBillonairesArePushing. And by golly are they pushing AI.

[-] FG_3479@lemmy.world 47 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

GrapheneOS is using AI models to find vulnerabilities before others do. The Bitcoin Red Team did the same and found an absolute ton.

I hate the AI bubble, but they're forced to use AI to defend against AIm

[-] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 4 points 2 days ago

And by-golly are they pushing AI.

What, you mean this fantastic enthusiasm isn't entirely organic?

load more comments (10 replies)
[-] Vendetta@feddit.org 57 points 3 days ago

I'd argue that this news is over-blown. The project has more than a solid and honorable track record with insanely talented engineers behind it. AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.

The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions. If GOS team, who again would be at the top % in the field, feel that this can elevate the project, should we not give them the benefit of the doubt?

[-] Routhinator@startrek.website 20 points 3 days ago

My thought it was over blown until I saw them claiming that anyone on Mastodon is "not a user" and them saying that any real users are on their Discord and not complaining.

Uh, OK - Discord was semi-excusable up until 2025, but at this point anyone using it to communicate with their users is certainly not considering how bad that channel is for user privacy. Im a Graphene User, I will not use Discord, and I am not going to continue to use an OS thats supporting the rapid expansion of datacenters through the use of AI.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 14 points 3 days ago

Exactly this. As much as I hate the current AI scenario across the board, the GOS team has shown, time and again, that they are stellar developers and coders, that they genuinely care about security, and that they are the best at countering anti-privacy on the technology front.

If any team can use AI responsibly to improve all this, it's the GOS team. And if it ends up failing on it's face, I expect them to move away from it if things go south. Now, if they don't because of 'AI addiction', then I will be looking at what my alternative options are. Until them, I'm 100% with them, as they have not given me any reason yet to doubt their judgement.

load more comments (37 replies)
[-] shifty@leminal.space 166 points 4 days ago

I'm with Linus Torvalds and GrapheneOS on this. AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.

[-] stopforgettingit@lemmy.world 81 points 4 days ago

I am sure I will be down voted on Lemmy for this but using AI for development by a team who is already experienced in development of the product they are working on is not a moral failing.

load more comments (15 replies)
load more comments (47 replies)
[-] VykeTheGreat@anarchist.nexus 111 points 4 days ago

I haven't dug into the code, but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating. There's a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to "use AI" on a project.

[-] Bobhasrunnedawayagain@lemmy.world 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I understand this but, you have to consider the ecological impact of it, the thousands or more people whose work was stealed to train AI, the constant shoving of AI into everything and the problems that have arise from it, the campain AI companies did and do telling people they are going to lose their jobs and constant fearmongering, the constant blatantly lying of "AGI achieved", the layoffs by senile CEOs, the debt that is causing because stupid people in power gonna be stupid, etc. There are plenty of reasons to hate AI and what it is doing to our world and people lives in general. Sure there are positives but the negatives clearly outweighs the positives.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (36 replies)
[-] unglueclass23@programming.dev 31 points 3 days ago

A bit unrelated, but I wonder if I'm the only one left that is:

  • Using small, open-weight models
  • Asking it to only write small snippets that I can easily go through, check and understand.
  • Copying pasting from good old web frontends instead of integrating it into my editor or whatever else people do with agents nowadays.

I feel like when we're talking about AI this sort of usage gets lumped into the same pile as agentic vibe coding and it's not helpful for discussion. Surely most people wouldn't find this problematic?

load more comments (12 replies)
[-] chewypoops@lemmy.world 36 points 3 days ago

There really is a difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and I don't know enough about actually coding to look at their repos and tell you what's happening.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 65 points 4 days ago

If they're just using it to find and patch bugs/exploits? Fine by me.

Vibe coding? Get the fuck outta here.

load more comments (13 replies)
[-] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 3 days ago

God. Motherfucking. Damnit. All. To. Hell.

[-] qyron@sopuli.xyz 82 points 4 days ago

I am not a coder in any fashion but this is the make or break frontier for development, particularly FOSS and small scale projects.

AI is evil.

It is an ecological nightmare, socially and economically distructive, prompted on the theft of the knowledge and work of every creative endeavour any person as ever made and pointed at rendering pointless any future aspiration of individual creation someone may have.

The association has been made and it is not going away.

[-] harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 83 points 4 days ago

AI in concept is not evil and could be a good thing .

Unfortunately, its implementation has been at the hands of rapacious, avaricious, and narcissistic über-capitalists, which has inextricably linked AI with the evils you enumerated.

In a different timeline, AI was developed slowly, using heavily-vetted and legally obtained data, and rolled out in an intelligent and safe way.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

What? So I use my Intel B70 to help code a useful application. Maybe use a half kilowatt to do so. Play a game for an hour you'd use the same.

The current crop of AI companies are doing what you hate, not AI.

load more comments (57 replies)
[-] Mac@mander.xyz 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Well capitalism is based on unethical practices so what's the point of striving to be ethical!!!

Is what I'm reading

[-] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Well capitalism is based on unethical practices so what’s the point of striving to be ethical!!!

Is what I’m reading

I am reading the same. A variation of "everyone's doing it, why should I act ethical?" Fuck them.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
275 points (90.6% liked)

Technology

88021 readers
3452 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS