So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that. :/ I’m going to leave the comments …

Personal opinion: Nathan seems to be really side-stepping a lot of concerns brought of up in the comments there. And referring to people coming together collectively in an open-letter when virtually all other channels are closed as ‘brigading’ is… Not cool. Edit: he retracted the use of brigading.

EDIT 2: Nate has since closed the comments on his blog, and the one discussion thread on KDE Discuss about the AI Policy was closed suddenly without explanation after a KDE developer began to discuss the ethics of AI use. Nate then responded after the thread was closed with this:

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    151·
    4 days ago

    Attempts to have your cake and eat it too are always going to be pretty fraught when it’s a moral / ethical issue. If you try to compromise then no one is happy except the opportunists who see it as a chance to push for further changes in their direction.

    Several weeks ago, a KDE developer started a mailing list thread asking about how we should handle the flood of AI slop merge requests. Everyone agreed it was a problem, and that we don’t want that crap.

    That bit of context was certainly left out of the story when I first heard it and had I known that I would have read the proposed policy more charitably.

    As an aside - this is the problem with having mailing lists and chatrooms - they are not on the web so it’s impossible to link to the original source / context and this provides an opening for people who want to stir up some shit. I use Matrix a lot less these days, for that reason.