(Replying to -vote because that's where the discussion is taking place. While non-DDs can't vote, the discussion is open to everyone and all constructive contributions are welcome. At least that's how I understand it.)
Aryan Karamtoth wrote: > I've been reading the proposals listed for the GR about a project-wide LLM > policy so far and they're all great but I feel like they've been focusing on > the extreme end of the discussion -- either ban them completely or allow them > completely. > > I was trying to imagine what a "middle ground" proposal might look like if it > were to exist and I got a glimpse of it when I saw GCC announcing its own AI > policy [1]. > > >The GCC steering committee has announced that it has accepted an AI > >contributions policy recommended by >the GCC AI policy working group. > > >The policy, in part, states that the project will decline any "legally > >significant contributions which include LLM->generated content or are > >derived from LLM-generated content". It uses the definition of "legally > >significant" >from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines, which holds that > >the threshold is "around 15 lines of code and/or >text" to qualify as > >significant for copyright purposes. GCC maintainers may, however, choose to > >accept legally >significant test cases that are generated by an LLM. > > >The policy does not forbid use of LLMs for research, analysis, bug discovery > >and reporting, patch review, etc. as >long as the output is not included in > >contributions. The committee says that it expects the policy will evolve and > >>will be revisited periodically. > > I feel like a similar proposal (maybe Proposal F) could focus on something > similar: > > " Allow LLM usage only for research or understanding purposes but forbid any > of that work from being directly materialised into code or documentation > (copy pasting). " > > This way we can not only limit the usage of LLMs in the project but also > avoid DFSG compliance issues because the code must be written by humans. > > I personally feel like allowing LLM usage directly in the project would only > result in more unmaintainable codebases, poor quality packages and a > technical debt that will be a burden on new contributors as they may not be > actively interacting with mentors for help. We're already dealing with > several occurrences of server downtime because of the clankers and some vibe > coded debian packages lying out there in mentors.d.net. > > On the other hand, we're way past the point where we can just block the usage > of LLMs completely because to be honest, despite being an anti-LLM person > previously (I still am but not very aggressive), I found them to be of some > use when dealing with problems where there's a lack of documentation or > little resources online but when it comes to code, they still do a horrible > job. We need to focus on maintainability too and LLMs are bad at that. > > A good way forward that I personally see is actively discouraging LLM usage > but not outright banning it completely and ensuring that the final work is > human written even though there might be some LLM assistance with research or > understanding errors. > > I do not have voting rights yet so I just thought I'd raise my point of view > about this GR. > > [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1086041/ > > -- > Regards, > > Aryan Karamtoth, > Debian Maintainer It is my understanding that the GCC policy addresses only one concern about AI, that is, the copyright status of AI-generated code. They won't incorporate code that someone else might be able to claim copyright on. That's the whole point of the "legally significant" thing and that's all they seem to worry about. Other activities are allowed simply because they don't result directly in adding code to the GCC codebase, so they are zero-risk from that point of view. That is of course a valid concern, and possibly the one that could most directly cause legal liability (in the current legal situation -- it is also possible that future rulings may establish that the output of AI is never copyrightable, thus voiding the issue). Other concerns are outside the scope of their policy and not addressed at all: the reliability and quality of AI-generated contributions, the negative effect on human ability to understand the codebase, the burden that a flood of AI-generated patches place on maintainers, the environmental impact of running big LLM models, and so on. It is ok to adopt the GCC policy *if* you do not think that those other concerns matter. Gerardo
