What’s Devuan’s position on this? They already forked after the SystemD switch. Here’s to hoping they also flip the bird to AI.
AFAIK they do not yet have an official stance on AI/LLM use within the project.
Not yet. I suppose it shouldn’t be long…
Initially sent to debian-private, shared here because I want the consequences of Debian fully embracing fascist-backed technology to be known.
That seems to be a bit far reached and naive. Hopefully Antoine isn’t driving cars, because there are several brands that were supported by Nazi’s at one time in the past.
Besides that, I think it is good to have a discussion about the use or LLM. I just think that the reason here is a bit unusual.
“AI scrapers break the web, to use this page you’ll need JavaScript enabled.”
The ironic…
The without disclosure part tells everything you need to know here. If it’s such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that? In an open source Community shouldn’t everything like that be known?
I wonder what’s the reason to make it optional? I think I’ve seen this approach with other projects as well. Isn’t transparency and accountability a good thing? Also, this kind of information helps immensely when reading pull requests or silly bug reports. And Debian acknowledge there might be licensing issues. So it might become some sort of liability to them once it taints everything and we can’t even tell?! So why? What’s the upside? Adorn oneself with borrowed plumes and not being forced to disclose the fact? Or too much bookkeeping?
I think it’s just the simple fact that there’s no way to enforce it
Which tells a lot about how good they are. Slop is slop because it’s bad, but a high quality PR isn’t
Conversely… if it’s so benign, why should it have a label?
Eye contact is benign for most of us. We still give it a context warning in civilized circles. It costs us almost nothing, and lets people make an informed decision what you engage with.
Not really worth discussing - it’s not benign, and it can be made purposefully not benign by a third party without notification or knowledge. A third party who has already demonstrated a penchant for world domination, both technologically and physically.
Code in general is proven not to be benign
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
I mean, I would think, at least. It seems to me that most of the people in charge of big projects are usually FOSS purists.
That’s part of the reason why AI scrapers are breaking the small web. FOSS purists really have no significant defense against it aside from Anubis.
Real DoS protection comes from capacity, which costs serious dollars, especially in this day and age where botfarms can be hired by the hour for rather cheap and record-breaking attacks seem to happen like monthly.
The alternative is using a CDN, but there are none that align with FOSS ideals. And for CDNs to be really effective, you need them to break open TLS and handle the decrypted traffic, which raises privacy concerns on top.
But anyways…most license agreements would make it a requirement that if you’re using an open-source model, that it be properly attributed, right?
I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.
Most developers who use these tools (even FLOSS developers) appear to be using the corporate owned models that were definitely trained on both proprietary source code and code that is incompatible with the GPL license. Some EU courts have also already judged that LLM code cannot be copyrighted, which also means it cannot be licensed as GPL.
Currently, all code generated with an LLM has a 3 to 10% chance of unknowingly plagiarizing the copyrighted code it was trained on, and any FLOSS project that uses it is making a huge gamble that their codebase won’t be scanned by corporations in the future looking for violations to sue about, shut down rival FLOSS projects, etc.
It would be Useful for doing a retrospective on whether AI is helpful or not
Respect to Antoine. Having principles that are worth a damn is a rare trait amongst developers these days.
and the death blow is when more like-minded developers do the same… there won’t be enough left that would vote to change policy to try to lure some back.
The world needs more people that act on principles and take a stance.
Weird that he didn’t care when Linus Torvalds adopted basically the same policy to the kernel that serves as the foundation of the main Debian distribution. I have an inkling that there is more going on at Debian, not LLM use alone.
didn’t he? have you checked?
the main thing is that it’s an upstream problem. the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles. if you want to stay on that kernel you have to take what you are given. in your own organisation you can at least try to change things.
I don’t think so. I got no sources or anything, but I think most nuclear missile silos and their software predate the linux kernel. And since we don’t really build nuclear weapons anymore but stick with the ones we already have, I don’t think that the linux kernel is really used in these kinds of sites.
However, that’s me guessing - wouldn’t say that I’m even 50% confident.
the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles
source:
Idk anything about this…but here is my Google results
Don’t think golden dome is actually implemented, though just some trump delusion…but apparently this Redhawk Linux is used in…
Nuclear missiles probably run vxworks or another rtos, not linux
FOSS nukes when?
He didn’t leave the Linux-based OS for Linus Torvalds himself stating a similar policy for the Linux kernel before Debian did.
Debian has a history of maintaining ancient kernels. But it’s hard to believe that he assumed Debian to just fork Linux…If he resigned only now, he didn’t resign before. What is there to check? That is common sense. Linus allowed LLM use and he was fine with Debian building on it. After all, all LLM use is literal fascism in his eyes.
@ProdigalFrog
> “Pretending to have a “neutral stance” when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.”Bars. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision, I hope Antoine gets to keep his peace undisturbed.
Well what would the disclosure requirement improve? It’s unenforceable and it just gets in the way of evaluating the code based on quality. Every code should have high standards. Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.
If a project allows llm contributions then disclosing it will only make people weary of the wrong things. Putting a badge on it is not helpful anymore if it’s allowed. I have seen good llm code and bad human code.
Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.
Bad LLM code is worse than bad human code. LLMs sanitize out markers that humans use to catch and correct mistakes.
The Free Software Foundation of Europe recently published an article detailing why it’s legally quite important for developers to disclose and carefully catalog which code was created by LLMs.
https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html
Recommendations for AI usage in Free Software contributions
With these issues in mind, the recently published Recommendations When Using LLM-Backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions by the SFC outlines some of the legal difficulties for copyright and licensing that generative systems have created for software developers who wish to write, maintain, or contribute to Free Software projects.
Notably for the purposes of this article, the SFC recommends the full recording and disclosure of how and when an AI tool was used to assist in the creation of a contribution. As stated by the SFC:
“FOSS project leaders cannot make good decisions about LLM-gen-AI policy if they cannot survey which contributions were assisted, and how much they are assisted. Part of the contribution process should (at least) include a disclosure of what LLM-gen-AI system was used, its version (as these system change over time), and a brief description of how the system assisted the contributor. This information should be included in a machine-readable format in commit logs."
Indeed, such disclosure can be an important foundational step to allow for the accurate assessment of the copyrightability of code that has been assisted or generated by AI tools, in order to assess their licensability into Free Software. Open and clear disclosure is a helpful step for the Free Software community to maintain a healthy licensing ecosystem, which is currently threatened by the legal uncertainties that come with the advent of generative AI.
Additionally, it is worthwhile for developers to document in some capacity the extent of human work that they have done in their software projects, whether it be the writing of code, the selection and arrangement of components within the project, or the extent of human modification of machine generated content.
Code is a liability. The only thing that balances it out is people who understand the code. The people are the asset.
If you contribute LLM-generated code but not your understanding, you’ve essentially taken out a loan in the maintainers’ names.
Building tech debt you never pay down is the way you kill open source projects.
What wrong things?
Surprising that it was even an option.
There were 8 options and Debian has ranked choice voting. This was actually around the middle of the spectrum of options, so with half voting most to least restrictive and the other vice versa, the middle of the road choice won.
That actually won the vote? Ha!!!
Great. So what distro should I be using now?
According to this list, here are the distros that actively reject AI/LLM contributions:
- Asahi Linux - https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/
- Chimera Linux - https://gts.chimera-linux.org/@chimera/statuses/01KK78VSB4G5S75STYEY3YTR2H
- Elementary - https://docs.elementary.io/contributor-guide/development/generative-ai-policy
- Gentoo - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy
- NetBSD - https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html
- PostmarketOS - https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/development/ai-policy.html
- Redox OS - https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-policy
I’ve found that AntiX also rejects AI usage based on a conversation about it in their forum, but they are based on Debian, so…
There’s also this list with a few more not listed in the first.
i understand there are a lot of facist AI companies, but how can an entire technology be facist?
That’s like saying space travel is facist because pretty much all of it was built on work by literal nazi scientists.
Do we throw out all the related advances too? Satellite communications, GPS, etc.?
Honestly it feels like I’m taking crazy pills some days. I run local models on my system, and the technology is legitimately fascinating. I am not talking about the broligarchy, merely the underlying technology is weird and fun to play with.
One thing is for certain - the box Pandora had this thing lying around in has been kicked open, and it cannot be shut. We’ll just have to figure out what that means for all of us.
Good question. I think there’s some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It’s also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology…
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They’re under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they’re kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn’t yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water…
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents’.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car… 400 TV channels… a more precise weather forecast… We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil… I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn’t just forced upon me by oligarchs…
You can train a model. Today.
You got a spare $80 million laying around to train one?
One argument is that those who make LLMs have a high amount of control their output. It’s giving a lot of control of open source to the whims of those companies to become reliant on LLMs
Think about the potential for providers to add plausibly deniable backdoors, general lower quality code, etc. when they think you are working on a project they care about. The precedent is there with Anthropic publicly stating that Fable was built to intentional sabotage quality when they think you are working on AI research related tasks or distillation. That kind of stuff can be subtly baked into open models as well
tools shape our perception of the world, and in turn us. neutrality is tacit approval. when a fascist company develops a technology, and some people say “we don’t want technology developed by fascists”, the “compromise” position is “you could have some technology developed by fascists”
if you look into operation paperclip and all the politics following that, you’ll see that there was a ton of pushback. the german scientists were literal nazis, but in the worst way; they were the compromising kind. only that the compromise was between “kill people” and “don’t kill people”, so the result was “kill some people”. and living in that environment changes your perception of the world. as the song goes, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? that’s not my department” says wehrner von braun
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”
Over the past 5 years or so, I have really come to despise the phrase “just a tool”.
Honestly “just a tool” is the same as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The phrase frames the context as if EVERY tool can have plenty of reasonable non-destructive purposes.
Tell us more. Your ideas sound unique.
Go fuck yourself with your tired, “bUt WhAt aBoUt VaCciNeS,” argument.
Yeah.
