Been a long time Debian user but with the recent AI decision I am planning on moving on so anyone have an anti-AI recommendations? I understand its being used in the kernel as well but are there any distros taking a full anti-AI approach to the parts of the code they control?
Since folks seem a little confused on what I am referring to here is the mailing list page regarding the use of gen ai without disclosure vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2026/08/msg00360.html
Phoronix article on it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Votes-Responsible-AI-Use
I’d say wait and see what they actually do. People are super trigger happy with shitstorms these days. But maybe wait for them to actually do something bad?!
LLMs were created with the mass theft of others work by corporations that are now reselling that same information while making billions off it. Thats enough for me to want to step back from any project utilizing these tools.
Yeah. But my point is: They’re not utilizing those tools. At least not yet.
Looking back at my Linux experience, I have a lot of trust in the Debian community. Including to do the right thing. Even if it’s difficult. They don’t always get everything right. But they’re pretty alright. I wouldn’t just throw it all in the bin because of some hypotheticals. And democracy isn’t easy. We judge people by what they do. (At least I do.)
I understand they may not be utilizing them yet, but the vote was approval of the tools without disclosure. So this isn’t hypothetical, they are going to begin using them and therefore it makes sense for those with concerns regarding the technology to start looking for alternatives. It doesn’t require them to start adding AI chat bots to Debian or anything like that for me to make this move. The tool itself is the problem.
That remains to be seen… As I said, they earned my trust over many years. Maybe they’re able to tackle it, as they faced other challenges. I mean you’re free to throw away democracy on a whim. I think it needs to be addressed and tackled. Votings have turned out with bad results before. It’s ugly. But I’m still subscribed to the ideology. My red line is something bad actually happening not just on paper and in some hypothetical future. Until then, there’s plenty time to repent. I still have my hopes up. They’re good people and have been doing a phenomenal job until now. I don’t think I want to ignore that. But I’m not stopping you from having some alternative plan ready. 😅 That’s not a bad idea either. All I’m saying is: Don’t borrow trouble. (And “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Democracy might indeed be a good thing, despite it’s downsides.)
Lol, no its all circular investing and will soon fail to prop itself up. Then all that stolen work gets sent to open weights for everyone to use. Still not the best, but you can’t close Pandora’s box.
Just like with every financial crisis, when the bubble bursts they will get absurd amounts of money to save their unethical shite companies with money from all of us (through taxes). The rich only ever get richer.
They just recently did something bad.
What did they do? All I saw was them talk and do democracy. All of that is allowed from my side. I don’t think they incorporated any AI stuff (yet). At least I’m not aware of anything?!
They decided to take a vote on whether or not to “Ban LLM contributions” where the proposed policy wasn’t all that well thought out, and ended up settling on a subsequent proposal which was even worse, enshrining in official policy the standard that LLM contributions are just fine actually and don’t even need to be disclosed. The governance system, in this case, failed spectacularly. The contributors they will lose as a result of this are in my view likely to be more valuable ones than those they’d have lost had the vote gone the opposite way. It’s substantially worse than having done nothing at all. It does not inspire confidence in the future of Debian, and is enough to have many of us looking around to see what alternatives might exist.
I think democracy is a good thing. Full stop.
It ain’t easy though. Not even for the Debian community. But what’s the alternative? Some corpo distro? They’re going to adopt AI as well. And benevolent dictator might be alright… Yet, I personally still prefer a democracy. Even if it’s difficult. Sometimes voting results are sub par. But we need to deal with that, not drop it once the first difficulty arises?! What kind of strategy is that? I don’t think anyone is getting anywhere if they just keep dropping everything once they’re faced with problems.
@kbal @WorkingPie @hendrik Banning LLM contributions would be, at best, a symbolic gesture about a heavily politicized topic. For a team like debian, the concern should be about the quality of the contribution not what tooling was used.
Yes. And it goes further than that: Maintainability should also be a concern to maintainers. Doing good in the world is what pretty much all Free Software community projects are trying to achieve. They have to deal with licensing issues… It’s complicated.