Sam James <[email protected]> writes:

> Michał Górny <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Recently we've seen quite a grow in LLM usage in upstream packages, to
>> various degrees.  The exact degree differs, apparently ranging from
>> using LLMs as glorified autocomplete to asking them to rewrite the whole
>> project or being convinced that a chatbot is sentient.  The results are
>> raising some concerns.  I've originally written to the distributions ml
>> [1] to facilitate some feedback on how other distributions are handling
>> it, but the major players didn't reply.
>>
>> Our "AI policy" [2] covers only direct contributions to Gentoo.  At the
>> time, we did not consider it appropriate to start restricting what
>> packages are added to Gentoo.  Still, general rules apply and some of
>> the recent packages are starting to raise concerns there.  Hence I'm
>> looking for your feedback.
>>
>> Two recent cases that impacted the Python team were autobahn and
>> chardet.
>
> I think there are cases where we can uncontroversially (*) want to mark
> somehow, those are:
> 1) LLM-assisted rewrites for copyright reasons: clearly dubious
> ethically and legally;
> 2) where the quality has gone substantially downhill, so legal issues
> aside, it's not fair to our developers or our users (or upstreams of
> *other* packages) to expose them to bugs from the rewrite.
>
> Supposing we can agree that at least some packages require marking,
> there's some things we want out of that:
> 1) users being able to avoid such packages if they wish;
> 2) preventing software from relying on it (at least in some, perhaps the
> default, configuration(s));
> 3) avoiding people packaging tainted/broken versions.

I think in the end we may want at least two solutions:
1) catastrophic cases like chardet want something like p.mask as Eli
suggested, and
2) some LICENSE-based solution (or similar) for users to exercise their
choices, and I think I'd be one of them doing that.

>
> For technical ways of achieving this marking:
> [...]

BTW, we did discuss package.deprecated on IRC the other day, but we
concluded it was unsuitable. It is developer-facing (Portage doesn't
warn on it); would be unreasonable for it to do so as a lot of it would
scare users and not be actionable for them), so we'd need to introduce
another file for it, and even then, it'd lack a convenient way to
avoid said package, unlike with licence-based masking.

But it could work and users could, with a new file, put entries into
their own /etc/portage masks.

>
> (*) I consider these to hopefully have rough consensus even if
> the app-admin/keepassxc case doesn't.
>
> So, to me, it seems LICENSE is the best option even if not ideal, as it
> gives us most of what we want, and it's the closest to working.
>
>> [...]
>
> thanks,
> sam

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