[HN Gopher] Gentoo bans AI-created contributions
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Gentoo bans AI-created contributions
Author : jwilk
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-04-18 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| MR4D wrote:
| I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to submit some
| background artwork that is created by AI.
|
| Man, slippery slope!!
| fire_lake wrote:
| Interesting thread. I doubt they could tell reliably if AI tools
| are used though.
| lucb1e wrote:
| The article's answer to that:
|
| > Gorny wrote that it was unlikely that the project could
| detect these contributions, or that it would want to actively
| pursue finding them. The point, he said, is to make a statement
| that they are undesirable.
|
| > In an emailed response to questions, Gorny said that Gentoo
| is relying on trust in its contributors to adhere to the policy
| rather than trying to police contributions [...] "our primary
| goal is to make it clear what's acceptable and what's not, and
| politely ask our contributors to respect that"
| xyst wrote:
| There are some cases where you can kind of tell but yea it's a
| crap shoot. Any it's all based on intuition.
|
| Artwork, yea it's kind of easy - "kid in photo has 10 fingers
| on one hand". But for text, especially code or technical
| documentation.
|
| I honestly wouldn't be able to tell.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| If no one is able to tell, does it matter?
| lucb1e wrote:
| I think it does, at least until it produces better work
| than humans on average/median. We have enough trouble
| spotting bugs (including vulnerabilities) before they hit a
| beta or production release as it is. If the same diligence
| went into checking machine output, I think we would get
| worse code because in the scenario where you wrote it
| yourself (I'm imagining a patch here, not a whole project),
| you've got a good understanding of what you just wrote: how
| it's meant to work, why that method works, what the
| intention was with every statement. With machine output,
| you have to build that understanding before you can
| validate its work, and with the state of the art as far as
| I'm aware, the validation step really is necessary.
|
| It is also a matter of the universe versus the software
| engineers. With the universe striving to make better
| idiots1 who can all tell a machine what it should do in
| natural language without needing ~any skills, it would be
| the task of other people to mop up their potential mess.
| (Not saying that prompt engineering is a skill, just that
| you can get started without having acquired that skill
| yet.)
|
| Open source contributions are a benefit in several ways: it
| looks good on your CV, you feel like you're helping
| society, or perhaps you just want to fix a bug that you're
| personally affected by. I can see legitimate motives for
| using "AI" as seven-league boots, but the result where
| someone else has to do the work for you in the end seems
| immoral, even if that someone can't tell if the person was
| just unskilled or if it's machine-generated ("AI") output
|
| 1 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Comp
| ile...
| swatcoder wrote:
| You can't automate perfect enforcement, but you can express a
| norm (as they have) and hold individual human contributors
| accountable for following it so that when a violation is
| discoved the humanms other contributions can be scrutinized and
| the human can be penalized/monitored/whatever going forward.
|
| People bicker over the quality of generated content vs human
| content, but accountability is actually the big challenge when
| granting agency to AI tools.
|
| There are _many_ humans who might produce or contribute to a
| work, and when they violate norms it 's accepted that we can
| hold the person individually accountable in some way or another
| -- perhaps by rejecting them, replacing them, or even suing
| them. Much the way mature financial systems depend on many
| features of legal and regulatory norms that crypto can'f
| deliver, most mature organizations depend on accountability
| that's not so easy to transfer to software agents.
|
| If there are a handful of code generators and they're granted
| autonomy/agency without an accountable vouchsafe, what do you
| do when they violate your norms? Perhaps you try to debug them,
| but what does that process look like for a black box
| instrument? How does that work when those services are hosted
| by third-parties who themselves reject accountability and who
| only expose a small interface for modification?
|
| Here, Gentoo dodges the problem entirely by saying effectively
| saying "we're not going to leave room for somebody to poiny to
| an AI tool as an excuse for errant work.. if they contribute,
| they need to take accountability as if the work is wholly and
| originally theirs by representing it as so."
|
| Contributors may violate that policy by using AI anyway, but
| they can't use it as an excuse/out for other violations because
| they now need to stay steadfast in their denial that AI was
| involved.
|
| So ultimately, this doesn't mean that generated code won't
| appear in Gentoo, but it makes sure contributed code is held to
| no lower a standard of accountability.
| xyst wrote:
| Seems more like contributors will continue to use AI tools but
| won't specifically mention it.
|
| Outright deny. Innocent until proven guilty, right?
|
| No easy way to prove a commit, or piece of documentation was AI
| or not.
|
| Seems more like a virtue signaling to me
| lucb1e wrote:
| Had to look virtue signaling up:
|
| > a pejorative neologism for the idea that an expression of a
| moral viewpoint is being done disingenuously
|
| (--Wikipedia. Apparently it was a term was newly invented in
| 2004 and used by religions in 2010 and 2012. Then a journalist
| picked it up in 2015. Interesting to see a word so new that
| isn't a youth thing like yeet!)
|
| How is it disingenuous to ban this, what self-interest do they
| have in it?
| apetresc wrote:
| Firstly, please let me know which rock you've been living
| under for the last ~8 years to not know what 'virtue
| signalling' means, it sounds awesome and I would like to join
| you under there.
|
| Anyway, the insinuation is that they don't actually believe
| they can reduce the rate of AI contribution via such a
| statement, but that they're doing it just for the sake of
| showing everyone that they're on the anti-AI side of the
| fence, which indeed does seem to have become some sort of
| ideological signpost for a certain group of people.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Firstly, please let me know which rock you've been living
| under for the last ~8 years to not know what 'virtue
| signalling' means, it sounds awesome and I would like to
| join you under there.
|
| On the other hand it's been my experience that the only
| people using it unironically as a term are the sorts of
| people I don't want to talk to for any appreciable length
| of time, and them self-identifying by using it is extremely
| handy for me personally.
|
| It's like the reverse Nigerian prince email scam, as soon
| as someone drops "virtue signaling" I know to immediately
| disengage lest I be exposed to toxic and deranged opinions
| that are both low effort and boring to hear litigated.
| exe34 wrote:
| To save me from having to remember your name, please add
| me to your list of people who use the phrase "virtue
| signalling" unironically, even if I do so sparingly.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I suppose I'm one of today's lucky ten thousand. Join any
| time, the only requirement is learning something new every
| day!
|
| > some sort of ideological signpost for a certain group of
| people.
|
| That feels about as laden and insinuating as the formerly
| religious term from above. Do you think it's not okay to
| state that a method of creating works may not be used when
| one believes it to be (*checks the reasons given in the
| article*) potentially illegal under copyright, unethical in
| various ways (not sure how to summarize that), as well as
| exceedingly difficult to get quality output from? One of
| those reasons seem to me like it would be enough to use as
| grounds, with the only potentially subjective one being the
| ethics which would leave two other reasons
|
| I don't have a strong opinion on the ban, in case it seems
| that way. The reasons make sense to me so while I'm not
| opposed either, I'm also not a fan of selective enforcement
| that this runs a risk of, and the world moves on (progress
| is hard to halt). Perhaps there's an "AI" tool that can be
| ethical and free of copyright claims, and then the
| resulting work can be judged by its own merit to resolve
| the quality concern. So I don't really have a solid opinion
| either way, it just doesn't seem bad to me to make a
| statement for what one believes to be right
|
| Edit: perhaps I should bring this back to the original
| question. Is this virtue signaling if (per my
| understanding) it is genuine? I've scarcely known open
| source people (Gentoo isn't corporate, afaik) to have
| ulterior motives so, to me, the claim feels a bit...
| negative towards a group trying to do good, I guess?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Making a rule that is difficult to enforce isn't virtue
| signalling at all. It's adding a rule that is expected to
| be adhered to just like the other rules. It's useful to say
| outright what the expectations and requirements of
| contributions are.
|
| Actual "virtue signalling" is espousing a position that you
| don't really believe in because you think it makes you look
| good.
| ragestorm wrote:
| CYA and PR.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Does Gentoo really need PR you think? I'm not sure there's
| not a corporate division, but the main website says they're a
| foundation. (Then again, seeing how the cashflow works in
| places like Mozilla, maybe I should put less stock in that.)
|
| There's a CYA aspect in one of the three reasons mentioned
| (copyright concerns), I'm not sure that's necessarily bad if
| the thing they're banning is objectionable for (in their
| opinion) also two further reasons
| jl6 wrote:
| The supply chain risk elephant in the room is that bad-quality
| LLM-derived contributions could be kept out by the same rigorous
| review process that keeps out bad-quality human contributions.
| Now where did I leave that process? I'm sure I saw it around here
| somewhere...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| This is only gonna hurt Gentoo. They're not Ubuntu, they have no
| market power.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| They seem to have been managing just fine in past years without
| AI contributions, why would it suddenly be any different?
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I see many saying that contributors will continue using AI/ML
| tools clandestinely, but I'd counter that only a malicious actor
| would act in this manner.
|
| The ban touches on products made specifically for Gentoo, a
| distribution made entirely with Free/Libre software, made
| (mostly) by volunteers. Why would any of these volunteers, who
| chose to develop for the Gentoo distribution specifically -
| presumably because of their commitment to Free/Libre software and
| its community - go along with using AI tools that: A) Were
| trained on the work of thousands of developers without their
| consent and without regard for the outcomes of said training; and
| B) go against the wishes of the project maintainers and by
| extension the community, willingly choosing to go against the
| mission of the distribution and its tenets of Free/Libre
| software?
|
| It sounds to me that people would do this either unknowingly, by
| not knowing this particular piece of news, or maliciously, making
| a choice to say "I will do what I will do and if you don't like
| it I'll take my things and go elsewhere". I don't accept that any
| adult, let alone a professional developer would grin in the
| darkness of their room and say to themselves "I bet you I can
| sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week".
| What's the gain? Who would they be trying to impress? Let's not
| even open the big vault of problems of security that an AI coder
| would bring. What if your mundane calculator app gets an integral
| solving algorithm that is the same, down to the letter, as the
| one used in a Microsoft product? That's grounds for a lawsuit, if
| MS cared to look for it.
|
| The former case may prompt a reconsideration from the board - If
| key personnel drives the hard bargain, the potential loss of
| significant tribal knowledge may outweigh the purity of such a
| blanket ban on AI. The latter case surely will bring about some
| though, but of staying the ship and making the ban even more
| stringent.
|
| On a personal note, I use no AI products, maybe I picked them up
| too early but I don't like what they produce. If I need complex
| structures made, I am 100% more comfortable designing them
| myself, as I have enough problems trying to read my own code, let
| alone a synthetic brain's. If I need long, repetitive code made,
| I've had a long time to practice with VIM/Python/Bash and can
| reproduce hundreds of lines with tiny differences in minutes. AI
| Evangelists may think they found the Ark but to me, all they
| found was a briefcase with money in it.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > would grin in the darkness of their room and say to
| themselves "I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo
| project in less than a week". [...] Who would they be trying to
| impress?
|
| I agree with most of what you said, but as someone working in
| the security field, I know enough adults that I'd suspect doing
| something just for the heck of it. Not maliciously for any
| particular gain, but for the hack value -- assuming it's not
| deemed too easy to pull off and thus not interesting to try
|
| Overall, of course, yeah I agree people generally want to do
| good, and doubly so in a community like Gentoo
|
| > maybe I picked them up too early but I don't like what they
| produce.
|
| You don't use translation engines? As someone living in a
| country whose language they're still learning, I can't tell you
| how helpful translations from DeepL are. They're not flawless,
| but it's at a level that I come across polite and well enough
| towards someone like a prospective landlord or government
| agency, and my language skills good enough that I can see where
| it got the meaning wrong (so long as it's not some subtlety,
| but then it tries to be formal so that's also not often an
| issue). I'm sure there's more examples but just in general, I
| really do see their benefit even if I also see the concerns
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I agree with the use of such tools in our personal lives, as
| liability is not as big a problem and the stakes are lower
| generally.
|
| I only object to the use of AI in places where I have to put
| my signature and will be held liable for whatever output the
| AI decides to give me.
|
| Like that Lawyer that made a whole deposition with AI and got
| laughed out of the room, he could've been held liable for
| court fees of the other party in any other country, and
| lawyers aren't cheap! I don't imagine his employers were very
| happy.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Only as long as they know it's AI-created
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