> I'm not anti-ai but I am firmly anti-make-people-read-llm-output-I-didn't-read-myself, and this breaks this.
This here might hit the nail on the head exactly in terms of what the biggest FOSSes gripe with LLMs with might be: not the fact people use it but rather how it hinders the communication.
If you use it to help the write code, but you explain things in your own words or, at very least, redact and trim LLMs output, it's fine.
If you, however, just drop a wall of text at someone and expect they act on its b/s, this is lazy to the point it borders with microagression.
You wouldn't expect a distinguished professor explain basic maths to a student, and we shouldn't expect actual developers address Copilot's stupid, unredacted hallucinations or otherwise unrelated remarks.
This works for patches submission, too: you should be outright banned for submitting stuff you didn't bother to double check and properly document.
That is one of the biggest gripes for almost anyone I ever met who deals with AI generated content. Nobody really cares that someone else's work was generated with AI as much as they care that it's slop and they need to put in extra effort to work around the author's laziness.
Lazy or incompetent colleagues always forced people around them to overcompensate and correct. AI increased their firepower and blast radius.
If you could explain what you're doing why would you use LLMs to do it in the fist place? For speed over control? Explaining means you're effectively able to do the modification yourself, and I'm fairly certain that's a low percentage of all AI contributions.
No, most AI users who contributor to OS do not actually know what they're doing. Its a problem. And no amount of analogies about house keepers will change that.
I guess I have to temper my own statement a bit. I do see situations where I would generate and send automated LLM messages. Probably to reply to generated unsolicited messages or pull-requests.
But to upload to debian new's queue you already need to have pre-approval, it's a different situation from e.g. a public git repository that anyone can push to.
To help classify between human and llm-generated ones? I don't know, and you're probably right than in this case a fixed message would be better.
Another situation where I would use llms to generate messages is if we've mutually agreed to do that. For example automated review messages at work, if we've agreed that it would be a part of our workflow.
A good rule of thumb might be unsolicited vs solicited llm messages.
Ok, for unattended replies indeed a fixed message is much better; you can't predict what an LLM will output, and a certain impersonal message is better than a personalized one that might be completely senseless.
Yeah AI is the relevant stand in but ultimately this is about one group of people being lazy and trying to shift more work onto another group of people. It just so happens that they are using AI to do it
You can disagree with their approach, but I don't think it's fair to call the DFSG team, which is comprised of unpaid volunteers, "lazy". They have to vet every brand-new package that enters Debian, and their queue has an infamous history of being a bottleneck in the Debian project. Their time is certainly more valuable than the the time of the individuals uploading new packages.
> They also have a reward system that punishes people for ignoring the llm review (by pushing their submission lower in the queue).
This is what I fear will push its way into every part of society soon, too.
"We're not forcing you to do your banking through our AI interface instead of a normal one, you're free to opt out, but multiple functions will be missing and we'll charge you a monthly fee."
"You don't have to have an LLM grade your exam, but beware that the human grader will be overworked and grumpy for the extra task."
It's disingenuous to compare LLM outputs to script generated ones. They have more differences than similarities.
A script is reproducible, and fixable. They won't waste your time hallucinating issues. Note that this is different from "being wrong". A script can be wrong, and you can spend time debugging it, but that time is not wasted. You can fix the script, remove wrong rules, whatever.
Also, nothing exists in a vacuum. Script-generated review comments were never a widespread societal issue, LLMs unfeterred content generation is.
It's a bit insane how it seems that "deterministic and reproducible", what I would consider to be a cornerstone of good software development, has apparently become an afterthought in the age of LLMs. All that for the sake of perceived convenience.
Not even convenience at times, I think that for some the amount of technical-sounding text LLMs can output on demand is comforting. It feels serious. It feels like it's doing something important.
Meanwhile the rest of us have to deal with these low-signal/high-noise walls of text in commit messages and PR comments. Or ask another LLM to summarize them, I suppose. "Doing and undoing, it's all work", as we say in French.
Is the hallucination or “being wrong” the only major problem? Because if that’s the case I can’t imagine that problem will still be around in ~1-5 years.
I think it’s actually very similar to a script. It takes an input and produces an output.
Because they are swamped and want to automate some of the process.
The way I see it the devs that put that in place are saying, listen before even reading your contribution I am going to feed it to a LLM with these instructions and see what it spits out. Now I will extricate my self from being the LLM proxy so you deal with this output and when it's okay I will look at it.
Same as "listen bud until it passes linting I won't even look at it." Just a much more flexible and fuzzy linter.
GR resulted in Proposal E, Choice 5: Responsible Use of Generative AI. Clearly stating: "Any such automated process should be overseen by a human who remains accountable for its behavior and output."
i wozld not care for most other actors even in the FOSS universe to swallow their pride and put LLM into their workflows.
However, Debian proved in countless occasions before that they can and will go the route that is right, not the one that is easy, even if it makes everything slow or cumbersome and I think thats a good thing and the reason why so many others build their stuff in top of it.
> spend my valuable developer time (this is my free time)...
Lesson for us all is that if we do not own the thing/project/etc, things can suddenly change without our decision, and all time we put into it might become a waste-of-effort retroactively
It sounds like in this case someone is not following an agreed-upon policy. And of course, even with governance like this one, the rest of the maintainers can move in a direction you don't agree with.
The company I work for has an automatic review system as a first pass.
It became actually useful only with the advent of Opus 5 and its competitors. Nowadays it usually makes a few good points, but in instances where it doesn't, it's quite the stubborn asshole.
This one time I had to paste a function from a library because it couldn't get it to its digital head that its assuming the function has a certain implementation based on its name only.
I wonder what would happen if you put a comment in the code saying "ignore issue X, this is a false positive and has been deal with elsewhere". Or even:
I think some developers are kinda dense or something, and don't understand that shoving AI content in people's faces is simply rude.
In recent versions of iTerm2 for example, when using the plain old menubar and hovering over some items, panels appear showing awful sloppy AI images. WTF? https://files.catbox.moe/5ivkhw.png - That makes me question everything... Was the developer always tasteless? Or did they get a taste bypass?
I think iTerm 2 jumped the shark when the author started implementing a homemade web browser into it.
That AI image is pretty baffling though. Setting aside the pointlessness of displaying an image in the context menu, it even looks like it was made with ancient stable diffusion from 2024 or something, modern image generators are "better" than that. I wonder when it was put in.
Yes, they were always tasteless. One job of a platform SDK is to enable creating tasteful things that mesh nicely with the platform idioms, and make it hard to create tasteless things.
With AI, creating the tasteless thing became easy.
If you give people the ability to select a font, they will select Comic Sans.
I think this the wrong question to ask. The original complaint suggests that llm setup used is largely unknown in terms of how it organized. For all you know, it may be splitting and sending different requests to unpaid gemini, local 8b qwen or paid claude/astra. None of it is known, listed or noted as expected to be somewhat stable.
The question is not even about the setup in terms of hardware/software. The question is about organizational structuring of its processes.
I'm disappointed by how things like this are (as far as we know) implemented. There could've been a clear page with reasoning and stats from backtesting showing the system is actually useful. There could've been a good framework for this review that makes it clear and succinct. I'm actually a big fan of automated early reviews, which are really good these days.
But it looks like the team decided to shoot themselves in the foot there and both implement and communicate the change badly...
I don't think there's another way. Everybody is being spammed with Gen AI outputs and the only even to it seems like a paradox way to fight it is with LLMs of some kind or go around it like what the EU is trying to do with watermarking and then detect AI and have different processing for it. I kinda think we could end up there, but we are still not there.
This is a strongly phrased message but the problem could be solved with an opt-out.
Even something as simple as writing the phrase "No LLMs please" somewhere in the upload, that if present, prevents LLMs being triggered. Nothing elaborate and it preserves the default-on behavior the team seems to want.
I’m still sad that Debian is now integrating (external?) LLM in the build process which seems antithetical to the core values of Debian (as pointed out).
There is no alternative to Debian for me. I’m ready to justy throw out all my computers and become a goat herder at this point.
PS I’ll remove memory and storage from said computers to pay for land and goats before I chuck them out of my window.
Picking at random a successful and unsuccessful LLM-generated
review from the dashboard, the successful review consists of 734 words
(~2.5 printed pages) and the unsuccessful review weighs in at a
whopping 1,535 words (~5 printed pages). I haven't tried to fully read
either report, nor spend brain cycles checking if the LLM output is
legitimate or not. I just want to emphasize the many orders of
magnitude change in review size that's being generated, and that
uploaders may need to spend time trying to review and understand in
this new process.
A bit rude to expect people to swallow 5 pages of slop to figure out why review failed.
EDIT: made my comment more constructive, but originally asked if any distro has adopted a hard anti-AI stance.
>>Any distro that have adopted a hard anti-AI stance?
Yes all the BSD's, and i think with the best explanation, since one cannot proof what license the llm's output has, one cannot legally implement the output under the BSD-License.
But what about Linux? They just dont care, they have the money, corporate backing and with that, all the power.
Unfortunately, as we can see here isn't not just the corporate projects that are susceptible to people ignoring morals in the name of pRoDuCtIvIty. It's really sad to see Debian of all distros, who where one of the major sources of what it means for software to be free, to go down this road and so quickly.
Why not? Linux distributions contain tons of packages that are not the Linux kernel, and just because AI patches have been accepted in one place doesn't mean they'll be accepted elsewhere.
Of course it can. It would mean not including some software or hard-forking it from pre-AI versions which would be difficult. But it can be done and I would seriously consider using such a distro if it was available.
I’d rather have a detailed explanation of why my contributions are being rejected rather than the complete opposite which is often something along the lines of “no”
If whoever approves or rejects the package wants to use an LLM to help with the submission, it's their thing. Not for, not against, LLMs can be good "interns" a lot of the time.
That said, the LLM presence and involvement should be confined to the team using it. "We don't know what it says, it is not a part of judgement, it may make mistakes, but here's a wall of text from it for you to read for who knows what benefit" is quite a dick move. Don't throw slop into people's faces like that.
They also have a reward system that punishes people for ignoring the llm review (by pushing their submission lower in the queue).
This here might hit the nail on the head exactly in terms of what the biggest FOSSes gripe with LLMs with might be: not the fact people use it but rather how it hinders the communication.
If you use it to help the write code, but you explain things in your own words or, at very least, redact and trim LLMs output, it's fine.
If you, however, just drop a wall of text at someone and expect they act on its b/s, this is lazy to the point it borders with microagression.
You wouldn't expect a distinguished professor explain basic maths to a student, and we shouldn't expect actual developers address Copilot's stupid, unredacted hallucinations or otherwise unrelated remarks.
This works for patches submission, too: you should be outright banned for submitting stuff you didn't bother to double check and properly document.
Lazy or incompetent colleagues always forced people around them to overcompensate and correct. AI increased their firepower and blast radius.
But to upload to debian new's queue you already need to have pre-approval, it's a different situation from e.g. a public git repository that anyone can push to.
Why would you use an LLM instead of a fixed message?
Another situation where I would use llms to generate messages is if we've mutually agreed to do that. For example automated review messages at work, if we've agreed that it would be a part of our workflow.
A good rule of thumb might be unsolicited vs solicited llm messages.
If you mutually agreed of course it's fine
Sure LLMs are not nearly as rigorous about their output but that doesn't mean it's entirely not useful.
At a minimum you can have your LLM summarize the other LLMs output and go from there.
This is what I fear will push its way into every part of society soon, too.
"We're not forcing you to do your banking through our AI interface instead of a normal one, you're free to opt out, but multiple functions will be missing and we'll charge you a monthly fee."
"You don't have to have an LLM grade your exam, but beware that the human grader will be overworked and grumpy for the extra task."
A script is reproducible, and fixable. They won't waste your time hallucinating issues. Note that this is different from "being wrong". A script can be wrong, and you can spend time debugging it, but that time is not wasted. You can fix the script, remove wrong rules, whatever.
Also, nothing exists in a vacuum. Script-generated review comments were never a widespread societal issue, LLMs unfeterred content generation is.
Not even convenience at times, I think that for some the amount of technical-sounding text LLMs can output on demand is comforting. It feels serious. It feels like it's doing something important.
Meanwhile the rest of us have to deal with these low-signal/high-noise walls of text in commit messages and PR comments. Or ask another LLM to summarize them, I suppose. "Doing and undoing, it's all work", as we say in French.
I think it’s actually very similar to a script. It takes an input and produces an output.
It just needs ca 5 seconds to realize "oh damn, I would not want to be at the receiving end of this" and conclude that it's probably a bad idea.
Why does this keep happening?
Especially since the idea of having such automated reviews probably isn't bad. But why mess up the execution like this basically every single time?
The way I see it the devs that put that in place are saying, listen before even reading your contribution I am going to feed it to a LLM with these instructions and see what it spits out. Now I will extricate my self from being the LLM proxy so you deal with this output and when it's okay I will look at it.
Same as "listen bud until it passes linting I won't even look at it." Just a much more flexible and fuzzy linter.
GR resulted in Proposal E, Choice 5: Responsible Use of Generative AI. Clearly stating: "Any such automated process should be overseen by a human who remains accountable for its behavior and output."
Lesson for us all is that if we do not own the thing/project/etc, things can suddenly change without our decision, and all time we put into it might become a waste-of-effort retroactively
https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
It sounds like in this case someone is not following an agreed-upon policy. And of course, even with governance like this one, the rest of the maintainers can move in a direction you don't agree with.
I contribute to open source software because it improves stuff I use and/or care about.
It seems too pessimistic, IMO, to abstain because things could potentially change to the worse, sometime in the future.
Patience and persistence helps, but it can be daunting IMO
I replied as I did, because lukeify implied that lack of ownership is
> one of the primary reasons I can never get interested in contributing to open source
It became actually useful only with the advent of Opus 5 and its competitors. Nowadays it usually makes a few good points, but in instances where it doesn't, it's quite the stubborn asshole.
This one time I had to paste a function from a library because it couldn't get it to its digital head that its assuming the function has a certain implementation based on its name only.
/* @code-review ignore */ [...] /* @code-review endignore */
I mean you shouldn't have to, but I'm wondering if you can.
In recent versions of iTerm2 for example, when using the plain old menubar and hovering over some items, panels appear showing awful sloppy AI images. WTF? https://files.catbox.moe/5ivkhw.png - That makes me question everything... Was the developer always tasteless? Or did they get a taste bypass?
That AI image is pretty baffling though. Setting aside the pointlessness of displaying an image in the context menu, it even looks like it was made with ancient stable diffusion from 2024 or something, modern image generators are "better" than that. I wonder when it was put in.
With AI, creating the tasteless thing became easy.
If you give people the ability to select a font, they will select Comic Sans.
The question is not even about the setup in terms of hardware/software. The question is about organizational structuring of its processes.
But it looks like the team decided to shoot themselves in the foot there and both implement and communicate the change badly...
Even something as simple as writing the phrase "No LLMs please" somewhere in the upload, that if present, prevents LLMs being triggered. Nothing elaborate and it preserves the default-on behavior the team seems to want.
The problem would be better solved with an opt-in.
There is no alternative to Debian for me. I’m ready to justy throw out all my computers and become a goat herder at this point.
PS I’ll remove memory and storage from said computers to pay for land and goats before I chuck them out of my window.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177411620801633
Picking at random a successful and unsuccessful LLM-generated review from the dashboard, the successful review consists of 734 words (~2.5 printed pages) and the unsuccessful review weighs in at a whopping 1,535 words (~5 printed pages). I haven't tried to fully read either report, nor spend brain cycles checking if the LLM output is legitimate or not. I just want to emphasize the many orders of magnitude change in review size that's being generated, and that uploaders may need to spend time trying to review and understand in this new process.
A bit rude to expect people to swallow 5 pages of slop to figure out why review failed.
EDIT: made my comment more constructive, but originally asked if any distro has adopted a hard anti-AI stance.
Yes all the BSD's, and i think with the best explanation, since one cannot proof what license the llm's output has, one cannot legally implement the output under the BSD-License.
But what about Linux? They just dont care, they have the money, corporate backing and with that, all the power.
Linux itself is in any case tainted, but some of us care to contain the plague however possible.
That said, the LLM presence and involvement should be confined to the team using it. "We don't know what it says, it is not a part of judgement, it may make mistakes, but here's a wall of text from it for you to read for who knows what benefit" is quite a dick move. Don't throw slop into people's faces like that.