Tiago Bortoletto Vaz <ti...@debian.org> writes: > I personally agree with the author's rationale on the aspects pointed > out (copyright, quality and ethical ones). But at this point I guess we > might have more questions than answers, that's why I think it'd be > helpful to have some input before suggesting any concrete proposals. > Perhaps the most important step now is to get an idea of how Debian > folks actually feels about this matter. And how we feel about moving in > a similar direction to what the gentoo project did.
I'm dubious of the Gentoo approach because it is (as they admit) unenforceable, which to me means that it's not a great policy. A position statement, maybe, but that's a different sort of thing. I also agree in part with Ansgar: we don't make policies against what tools people use locally for developing software. I think the piece that has the most direct impact on Debian is if the output from the AI software is found to be a copyright infringement and therefore something that Debian does not have permission to redistribute or that violates the DFSG. But we're going to be facing that problem with upstreams as well, so the scope of that problem goes far beyond the question of direct contributions to Debian, and I don't think direct contributions to Debian will be the most significant part of that problem. This is going to be a tricky and unsettled problem for some time, since it's both legal (in multiple distributions) and moral, and it's quite possible that the legal judgments will not align with moral judgments. (Around copyright, this is often the case.) I'm dubious of our ability to get ahead of the legal process on this, given that it's unlikely that we'll even be able to *detect* if upstreams are using AI. I think this is a place where it's better to plan on being reactive than to attempt to be proactive. If we get credible reports that software in Debian is not redistributable under the terms of the DFSG, we should deal with that like we would with any other DFSG violation. That may involve making judgment calls about the legality of AI-generated content, but hopefully this will have settled out a bit in broader society before we're forced to make a decision on a specific case. I also doubt that there is much alignment within Debian about the morality of copyright infringement in general. We're a big-tent project from that perspective. Our project includes people who believe all software copyright is an ill-advised legal construction that limits people's freedom, and people who believe strongly in moral rights expressed through copyright and in the right of an author to control how their work is used. We could try to reach some sort of project consensus on the moral issues here, but I'm a bit dubious we would be successful. At the moment, my biggest concern about the practical impact of AI is that most of the output is low-quality garbage and, because it's now automated, the volume of that low-quality garbage can be quite high. (I am repeatedly assured by AI advocates that this will improve rapidly. I suppose we will see. So far, the evidence that I've seen has just led me to question the standards and taste of AI advocates.) But I don't think dealing with this requires any new *policies*. I think it's a fairly obvious point of Debian collaboration that no one should deluge their fellow project members in low-quality garbage, and if that starts happening, I think we have adequate mechanisms to complain and ask that it stop without making new policy. About the only statement that I've wanted to make so far is to say that anyone relying on AI to summarize important project resources like Debian Policy or the Developers Guide or whatnot is taking full responsibility for any resulting failures. If you ask an AI to read Policy for you and it spits out nonsense or lies, this is not something the Policy Editors have any time or bandwidth to deal with. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
