Hi Jose, Thanks for you input, I have a few comments:
On Fri, May 03, 2024 at 11:02:47AM -0300, Jose-Luis Rivas wrote: > On Thu May 2, 2024 at 9:21 PM -03, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote: > > Right, note that they acknowledged this policy is a working in progress. Not > > perfect, but 'something needed to be done, quickly'. It's hard to find a > > balance here, but I kind of share this sense of urgency. > > > > [...] > > > > This point resonates with problems we might be facing already, for instance > > in the NM process and also in Debconf submissions (there's no point of going > > into details here because so far we can't proof anything, and even if we > > could, > > of course we wouldn't bring any of the involved to the public arena). So I'm > > actually more concerned about LLM being mindlessly applied in our > > communication > > processes (NM, bts, debconf, irc, planet, wiki, website, debian.net stuff, > > etc) > > than one using some AI-assisted code in our infra, at least for now. > > > > Hi Tiago, > > It seems you have more context than the rest which provides a sense of > urgency for you, where others do not have this same information and > can't share this sense of urgency. Yes. > If I were to assume based on the little context you shared, I would say > there's someone doing a NM application using LLM, answering stuff with > LLM and passing all their communications through LLMs. > > In that case, there's even less point in making a policy about it, in my > opinion. Since as you stated: you can't prove anything, and ultimately > it would land in the hands of the people approving submissions or NMs to > judge if the person is qualified or not. And you can't block > communications from LLM generated content when you can't even prove it's > LLM generated content. How to enforce it? Hmm I tend to disagree here. Proving by investigation isn't the only way to get some truth about the situation. We can get it by simply asking the person if they used LLM to generate their work (be it an answer to NM questions, or a contribution to Debian website, or an email to this mailing list...). In that scenario, having a policy, a position statement or even a gentle guideline would make a huge difference in the ongoing exchange. > And I doubt a statement would do much, as well. What would be > communicated? "Communications produced by LLMs are troublesome"? I don't > know if there's much substance to have a statement of that sort. Just to set the scene a little on how I think about the issue: when I brought up this discussion, I didn't have in mind someone evil attempting to use AI to deliberately disrupt the project. We know already that policies or statements are never sufficient to deal with people in this category. Rather, I see many people (mostly younger contributors) who're getting to use LLMs in their daily life in a quite mindless way -- which of course is not our business if they do so in their private life. However, the issues that can arise using this kind of technology without much consideration in a community like Debian are not obvious to everyone, and I don't expect every Debian contributor to have a sufficiently good understanding of the matter, or maturity, at the moment they start contributing to the project. We can draw some analogy here in relation to the CoC and the Diversity Statement. They might seem quite obvious to some, and less so to others. So far I've felt a certain resistance to adopting something as sharp as Gentoo did (which I've already agreed with). However, I still have the feeling that a position in the form of a statement or even a guideline could help us both avoid and mitigate possible problems in the future. Bests, -- tvaz
