Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

I see many saying that contributors will continue using AI&#x2F;ML tools clandestinely, but I’d counter that only a malicious actor would act in this manner.<p>The ban touches on products made specifically for Gentoo, a distribution made entirely with Free&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;Libre software?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;Python&#x2F;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.

Given Gentoo is a non-corporate, all volunteer project I think this is the salient point:<p>“ In his RFC, he laid out three broad areas of concern: copyrights, quality, and ethics. On the copyright front, he argued that LLMs are trained on copyrighted material and the companies behind them are unconcerned with copyright violations. &quot;In particular, there&#x27;s a good risk that these tools would yield stuff we can&#x27;t legally use.&quot; “<p>Unlike Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, who all are corporate organizations with support revenue and legal teams to defend these issues, along with policy to prevent the issues, Gentoo is an all volunteer project that doesn’t have the organizational or financial support to fight legal battles. Their risk from copyright legal issues is much higher.

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&#x27;m sure I saw it around here somewhere...

Good. Explicit is better than implicit (or implied). Documenting the decision and making it clear is probably better for everybody -- both those who agree and those who disagree.<p>Lots of other projects also have reached the same decision, but the way of communicating this has not been clear. I suppose people with better wordsmithing skills than me will eventually end up with a more-or-less standardized expression to be included in the CONTRIBUTING file.<p>From the point of view of contributors, the situation is a little clearer. In the current situation, using most generative AI tools to produce content essentially stops me from being able to sign a DCO or a CLA to contribute this content, since they both say &quot;I certify that I wrote this&quot; and I can&#x27;t claim that any longer.

Interesting thread. I doubt they could tell reliably if AI tools are used though.

I think this policy is yet another example of ethical overengineering.<p>Yes, of course, ChatGPT &amp; Co. are very unlikely to take any real care about what they give their models to learn - especially with regard to copyright.<p>For a better perspective, I always try to transfer the behavior to the analog world. In this sense, someone who, for example, illegally obtains a book on Linux (let&#x27;s say via ebook) would not be ethically in the correct position to contribute to Gentoo, because the knowledge on which their contribution is based would be stolen intellectual property.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine that there are any people in this world whose knowledge was obtained exclusively through copyright legal means. We are all in a gray area - one possibly more than the other.<p>In my view, it is typical of engineers to simply transfer philosophically complicated moral issues to technologies. But this method will never come close to solving anything, because the very complicated analog moral world cannot simply be mapped to 0 or 1.

Without AI, I struggle with dyslexia and writing difficulties. With AI, I can contribute good code, with well written requirements spec, test plan, unit tests, documentation, and automation. I spend about ten hours a week working on open source, when before I spent none.<p>When I see an anti AI take that dismisses the potential and makes unlikely legal handwringing, I realize how much work is left in making open source accessible to those who struggle like I do.<p>I won&#x27;t be contributing to Gentoo or any project that rejects AI assisted work. I&#x27;ll keep working on my own accessibility projects and my own computational geometry codes.<p>I believe that in the end, accessibly focused projects will win the day here. AI assisted open source will become the norm, because it lowers the access barriers to good code.

Only as long as they know it’s AI-created

This is only gonna hurt Gentoo. They&#x27;re not Ubuntu, they have no market power.

I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to submit some background artwork that is created by AI.<p>Man, slippery slope!!

Seems more like contributors will continue to use AI tools but won’t specifically mention it.<p>Outright deny. Innocent until proven guilty, right?<p>No easy way to prove a commit, or piece of documentation was AI or not.<p>Seems more like a virtue signaling to me